Lighting Progression Gleam Shoot

For my GLEAM shoot I wanted to shoot my model by placing her in the middle of two soft boxes with gels in them and then a key light would be above her with another gel over the soft box. I wanted this lighting because I feel it is very different and the colours of the gels will grab onto the contours of the body and reflect the shimmer that I will be applying to the model. On the day the gels that were available to me were blue, red and orange. Originally I wanted two blue and one pink or purple, but unfortunately I couldn't get these.

In order to get this lighting set up to work I had to go round all of my lights separately and check how over/ underexposed they were, and to check the depth of the colours.

This first image is from the test of the blue gel, this is coming from a soft box on the right hand side of the model, after playing about with the brightness, I was finally happy with the strength of the blue.

I then switched off the blue light and turned on the red on the left hand side of the model, as you can see in the first image, it is far too bright, so after turning it down I got it to about the same as the first blue light.

I then switched on both of the soft boxes in this photo you can clearly see the light coming from either side of the model, on reflection I think the blue light on the right hand side of the model could have been a little bit lower, as the depth of colour isn't as rich as the red side.

I then turned on the key light with the orange gel on it, as you can see in this image it is too far down and needs to be brought up to illuminate the models face.

After bringing up the key light my images were starting to look a lot better, you can see clearly see the three gels on the models face and body and I was finally happy with the lighting. 

When looking at my images I realised that the hair wasn't right so I slicked it back and applied more of my liquid highlighter. I think this is a lot more flattering. I am really happy with this light as I feel that through this and make up the skin, especially round the collar bones is gleaming, so in this way I have really captured the essence of my word. 

Because I had done a make-up with lots of colour, I really think that having such extravagant lighting sort of took away from the makeup, so I tried a few more images without the gels on. as you can see from the image above my first shot was a little bit over exposed.

After turning the lights down you can start to see the make-up a bit better.

Then finally for my last two images I turned off one of the softboxes and placed a black board behind the model to create some shadows. I really like these images, and thhey are great for showing the makeup, but I think they lack the impact that you get from the images I have shot with gels.