What exactly is high & frosty?

This is a word that I’m translating from the Chinese net-speak “高冷”, meant as a vibe that a person gives off. Something similar to stand-offish, but with class. It’s a feeling that Paige wants to achieve, sort of a personal goal of hers.

Truth be told, I feel a little bit out of my depth here trying to achieve this with her.

There are a few things that makes this difficult for me, for one, my photos tend to capture my impression of other people. I can occasionally, by chance, capture shots that are outside of the norm, but they’re more about the decisive moment, more street-photography-esque. Paige also can’t make a serious face unless she’s angry at someone or something, especially not in front of me because apparently I “arise laughter”.

Anyways, I did the usual two light setup, one softbox, one umbrella. I Ended up only using the softbox most of the time though, probably the best 70 dollars I’ve spent this year, yet. Stupidly versatile, double-diffusion does a great job of scattering the light, and it’s portable enough that I can just lug it around anytime I want.

I had a couple ideas coming into this shoot. Last time I did a similarly themed shoot was with Alisha, and we used a lot of high-fashion and couches to achieve some really great effects. Another idea I had was to utilize the barrel distortion from 24-105mm (at the widest) to stretch out her legs and make the overall image more impactful.

However, the best shots still came from the 50mm.

It’s not to say that the images aren’t good; technically, they’re excellent. They just don’t have the magic I want, and Paige doesn’t like them either. 5/300 usable shots is much lower than my usual margin, and I’m not being too harsh on my shots either.

The entire shoot lacked je ne sais quoi.

I think I’m trying to fit into the high & frosty theme too much, and the whole thing is very much rigid.

The shots I ended up choosing are shots in the last 5 minutes of the shoot, and they were all shot in a succession, capturing a natural progression of expressions and actions. I think this is probably the closest thing I can achieve without making it look unnatural, and the overall juxtaposition works well. I originally processed the photos in black and white before I tried to color grade the red walls, and I couldn’t decide which ones I liked more.

I ended up creating almost a checkerboard, and I guess that’s probably the second best shot(s) of the shoot.

I still like Paige in her natural state much better, example below.

This is the best shot from the shoot, at least from my perspective, which means she’ll probably hate it, ha.

-Tao