How did we get this shot? Well. We spread a white sheet on the floor (next to a window, with good lighting of course) then she lay on the sheet, and then I put a chair over her and leaned over her with my camera. It's too bad I couldn't take a photo of me taking a photo.
This is my favorite model friend. She's always up for some fashion-esque photography experimentation. We peruse fashion magazines for inspiration. We saw some ads with models lying on their fronts, but when she lay on her back on the white sheet, and I saw her hair splay out - a deep black contrasting with white, I thought, this looks fantastic. Kind of Octopus-like. Mermaid-esque. And now I've used "esque" twice in one paragraph.
It's not easy to get hair to lay just right. It takes a few trials... of basically doing sit ups, but each time lying-flat on the floor. We wanted some of the hair to be trapped behind the shoulders (a dark background to dramatize neck and shoulder shape), but not tightly. And most of the hair should be arrayed around, but we wanted to maintain some control over the crown of the head. Yes, some of the hair was hand-arrayed by yours truly. One piece of hair is misbehaving, but the rest of the composition is interesting enough to distract from it.
