Chris Korsak

Portland Branding, headshot, and product photographer

Portrait of the artist Quinn Curnow

Psychedelic My Little Pony

October 14, 2019

This summer I created some artist portraits and product photography for my partner, Quinn. She’s an artist who has been making hand-made earrings for a while now, but recently wanted to put her jewelry creations on her website. She also wanted an updated artist portrait that fit with her aesthetic. What’s her aesthetic, you may be asking? “Psychedelic My Little Pony” comes to mind, but her website tagline says “Art Witch” so take your pick.

Artist Portraits

For the portraits, we talked a lot about aesthetics and styling before the actual photo shoot. This involved looking though a bunch of inspiration photos online and also photos from portrait sessions I’ve done in the past. Quinn was creative directing on this shoot for the most part. She made all the decisions regarding attire, props, and staging, and I concentrated on composition, posing, and lighting. You know, photographer stuff.

Here’s one of my favorites from the portrait session:

Quinn Curnow holding a pencil and sketchpad

I kept my lighting super simple for these portraits. The above photo is window light only. As we warmed up, I added a little fill light to brighten up the eyes and control shadow detail. Overall, the room light was providing the lighting “look” for the shoot.

I did however do a LOT of experimenting with the Lensbaby Omni filter kit. It’s creating this hazy, dazy, rainbow-y effects in the first photo of this blog post, and also the next two photos:

Experimental portrait of the artist Quinn Curnow Experimental portrait of the artist Quinn Curnow

When we were discussing photo aesthetics, she kept telling me she wanted a hazy film-vibe look to the photos. She absolutely didn’t want a sharp digital look. I used this as a good excuse to add some trippy effects via the Lensbaby Omni Filter, but I also added a decent bit of grain effect when processing these files in Adobe Lightroom.

Product Photography: Handmade Earrings

On a separate day, we photographed almost 30 pairs of Quinn’s hand-made polymer clay earrings. I felt like the hardest part leading up to this shoot was deciding on the right background. We did a number tests in the days prior to the actual shoot. She was leaning towards a stone or wood background, but in the end, we went with pink faux fur. Ha!

Here’s a few of my favorites from this session:

Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow Product photo of earrings by the artist Quinn Curnow

Conclusion

Whether it’s creating psychedelic my little pony vibes for Quinn, or classic business headshots on white seamless, commercial photography is all about realizing someone else’s visuals. That’s what is so much fun for me. I really do like the problem-solving challenge of this type of photography. I think we created photos that Quinn is proud of because there was a lot of brainstorming, questioning, and planning before a camera was ever taken out of the bag. Check out her website and all her stylish creations!

-Chris

PS, if you are an artist or maker and need photos for your website, hit me up!