Beneath The Brim
Fantasy Portrait Workshop with Hanna Saba at Sony Scene
Sony Scene put on a fabulous Fantasy Portraits workshop last Sunday night, featuring the beautiful Soylent Cosplay as Rani the Witch. The workshop was presented by Hanna Saba, who always manages to create such fun, imaginative shoots and find extraordinary models and characters to photograph.
We began in the late afternoon, photographing Rani in the warm sunlight along an avenue of trees.
As the light faded, the mood changed completely. Rani perched in front of the surrounding foliage while Hanna introduced blue rim lighting and pink and blue side lighting, transforming the scene into something much more theatrical and otherworldly.
Then came one of my favourite additions of the evening — “smoke in a can.” Wisps of smoke drifted through the frame, catching the blue light and creating an almost magical atmosphere around Rani.
Soylent’s attention to detail was extraordinary. Her makeup was beautifully applied, her costume exquisitely handcrafted, and the pièce de résistance was undoubtedly her enormous hat. Its sweeping shape, intricate underside and wonderful textures made it an absolute gift photographically. Rani’s second set of cast hands was another remarkable detail and added to the strange, fantastical quality of the character. Soylent had clearly considered every element of the costume, and she was also an excellent and expressive model.
Towards the end of the session, she removed the hat, giving us another opportunity to create a very different series of portraits. I particularly enjoyed one composition where the enormous hat sat prominently in the foreground, grounding the photograph and adding another layer to the image.
I came away with so many photographs that I loved that narrowing them down was surprisingly difficult. With such a striking model, Hanna’s lighting, the smoke and all the carefully chosen props, there were photographic possibilities everywhere.
For the body of work in this blog post, I wanted to show the progression of the session: the softer afternoon portraits, the transition into night, the blue lighting both with and without smoke, and the more theatrical full-length images. One of my favourites is a full-length portrait of Rani illuminated almost entirely in blue. In the surrounding darkness she is a witch emerging from another world.
I also wanted to look beyond the conventional portrait and explore some of the details that made the character so visually interesting. I cropped tightly into several images to showcase the beautiful arrangement of Rani’s hands, and created close portraits where the enormous brim of the hat became a compositional element in itself — sometimes forming a strong diagonal through the frame and sometimes a dramatic horizontal line.
Finally, I experimented with converting a few photographs to black and white. Blue is such an integral part of Rani’s visual identity, so the colour images remain at the heart of this series. But a handful of photographs seemed to call for monochrome, particularly those built around shape, texture, hands and strong lines. With these conversions, I was aiming for a silvery, slightly gothic monochrome rather than a harsh black and white. I wanted the tones to remain soft and atmospheric, with the eye gently drawn towards the slightly lightened hands rather than being pulled immediately to areas of stark contrast.
Rani also wears a transparent mask as part of her costume. In some photographs I deliberately tried to make the mask, rather than simply her face, an important part of the image. Its reflections and translucency created another layer of texture and mystery.
It was a wonderfully creative evening and a reminder of how much fun portrait photography can be when an extraordinary costume, a committed model, a great teacher, imaginative lighting and a little smoke all come together.
Thank you to all involved.
