MEET MY CLIENT LAURA COOK!
Laura is a financial expert. She had been helping an array of businesses over the last few years with their financial strategy and has noticed a commonality. Women have a lot of the same issues with money mindset.
She is now focussing in on helping female entrepreneurs with their money mindset. Laura and I worked together back in 2016 when she was speaking on finance planning at The North East Expo.
THE FULL SCH-WHAMMY PLANNING
I found out that Laura was getting ready to plan her Full Sch-Whammy from stylist Nichola. She and Laura have been working together for some time on regular shopping services. I truly love it when a client returns for ‘more of the good stuff.’ There is no entrepreneurial affirmation quite like the return of an eager familiar face!
ON THE FOX FORCE 5 TEAM THIS TIME
STYLE
Obviously, this time around, Nichola English from The Wardrobe Provocateur was to be styling this session. As she and Laura have been working together for so long, I knew they had a great connection. Nichola knew instinctively what style vibe Laura would like.
HAIR & MAKE UP
Marie from ND was to be joining the crew again on this session. As soon as she saw our mood-board, she had amazing ideas poised at her fingertips for both hair and makeup.
LOCATION – SEAHAM HALL
I wanted an opulent and diverse venue for this session. We scouted in The Lake District, and throughout Northumberland. We finally landed on Seaham Hall as our base.
LAURA’S LUXURIOUS HEADSHOTS FULL SCH-WHAMMY WISH-LIST
In the months leading up to Laura’s Full Sch-Whammy shoot, a wish-list developed that included some key factors. I knew that it was crucial to involve and include the following:
- Conscious Freedom. A sense of this along with the notion of positive power through female wealth.
Considered Opulence. Laura is not a flashy person. She does, however, prefer the finer things in life.
Cropping Options. As Laura is “not a visual person”, I knew she’d find it easier to compare photography when seeing it instead of imagining it.
LAURA’S FULL SCH-WHAMMY MOOD-BOARD
With the wish-list, planning and consultancy all in my brain, I was then able to start pulling together Laura’s very own luxurious headshots mood-board. I really enjoyed gathering the inspo on this project. It came to me in a fun flurry.
LAURA’S LUXURIOUS HEADSHOTS FULL SCH-WHAMMY SHOOT
It’s been a little while since I shot a Full Day Sch-Whammy session like this. I’d forgotten how much more in-depth and considered I feel I can shoot over a whole day. As a crew, The Fox Force 5 can really get into a steady flow. When this happens the magic happens on a much bigger scale for all of us.
SEAHAM HALL GROUNDS
The weather was forecast to be rainy later in the day. So I set all of our outdoors looks to the top of our schedule.
I’m still in love with how the gold Monsoon hat matches the gold colour of the natural moss on the stone. It couldn’t have been more perfect!
SEA-FRET MIST
By the time Laura had changed into her second outdoor look, we found ourselves surrounded by a beautiful rolling sea fret. For me, this adds to Laura’s brand narrative of clarity (with money). It was an oceanic gift! Thanks, Amphitrite!
The amazing jacket you are drooling over here is actually from New Zealand: The Alchemy Equipment brand. We got in touch with them during our live stories making on the day and they were super friendly with us. Connecting around the world. LOVE IT!
QUEEN OF THE MANOR
I really wanted to balance upon the fine line of regal and entrepreneurialism through this whole shoot, Laura teaches some great things about a common female mindset of “Waiting For Prince Charming”. I took this prompt a little further and wanted to tell the story of her as her own powerful Queen.
When you look at traditional “royal” or “affluent” female imagery. It’s so easy to make quick habitual assumptions that the woman featured within these images “is probably an heiress” or maybe that she “just married up”. I wanted to be careful we didn’t fall into any common clichés. It was crucial to me that we conveyed Laura’s normal disposition of quiet assured calmness in the mood of the photography I wanted to do as much as possible to visually explain “she’s self-made”, “powerful CEO”, “successful wealthy independent woman”.
We did a whole set of more muted headshots with a serious pop of lip colour. I really love the overall effect of these shots. Here is one of Laura sitting on the stairs at the very top of the Hall.
THE GOLDEN GOWN
Nichola had pulled a golden-yellow dress for Laura as a “Wildcard”. She often rocks up to a shoot fully prepared and then some. Its why I love her!
I could tell that Laura was not 100% convinced on the colour of this dress but as we kept it to our finale piece we shot this whole story as a wildcard concept. Marie did a gorgeous tousled-up look on Laura’s hair and we all really jammed on the vibe. Laura told me during her viewing consult that she was happily shocked at the results of this entire set. We kept these final headshots in the final collection. I really love them!
The Fox Force Five jump in for a quick finale photo at the end of our session. Thank, you guys! You are awesome!
LAURA’S LUXURIOUS HEADSHOTS EDIT
Laura and I met for a light bite and viewing together at Adriano’s in Gosforth. Over incredible coffee, we worked on Laura’s online gallery to select a final collection of Full Sch-Whammy Headshots. Laura was overwhelmed with how we would go about narrowing down the work. On showing her some tricks of the trade we managed to make our final cut after a little deliberation about end uses and so on.
THE LUXURIOUS HEADSHOTS RETOUCH
Laura’s retouching included a level of refinement I like to introduce at this level of shooting. Taking out unsightly distractions (like landscaping lights for instance) from the background of images really has a great overall effect to the final image result. I also wanted to colour balance the final collection of work in line with Laura’s brand colours. Where we had featured them in clothing, backdrop, or accessories, I made sure they were subtly enhanced at this stage of the work.
READ EVEN MORE ABOUT THIS LUXURIOUS HEADSHOTS SESSION
The rest of the team created a tonne of content around this Full Sch-whammy session. You can find out even more about how we all created this through these handy quick links:
STYLE:
Nichola’s blog explains how she found the right looks for Laura’s wardrobe on this session.
INSTA-STORY:
We have so much fun creating these stories live from the set. If you didn’t catch the one we made on the day of Laura’s Full Sch-Whammy Headshots Session, here it is again.
THROUGH CLIENT EYES
I asked Laura to do a quick piece to camera to let you know what she thought about this Headshots service. Here’s what happened:
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
If your mind has been blown into golden shards over this luxurious headshots session, and you would like some sparkle for yourself, you need to know where to go next.
MORE INSPIRATION
You can head directly to the Headshots Gallery to see more of my Headshots clients results and get ideas for how you would like to shoot with me for yourself.
DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE
If you are a details kind of person, you need to know how my different services work. To get a copy of my current collection just pop your email address in here and I’ll send you a copy.