For Kim, Who Makes Everything Beautiful...

...that's how Joe McNally signed my copy of his new book: The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light From Small Flashes. I'm still blushing as I'm still so touched by the gesture. It's always such a pleasure to work with him and his team and I had the privilege of doing so again, this past week. One particular shoot in general stood out to me: Thursday's shoot where Joe was testing out some new systems for Nikon and I was testing out the durability of some waterproof makeup products.....

The model for this particular production was going to be in a pool..entirely wet from head to toe (duh, obviously...she's in a pool) . She was going to be flipping her almost waist length hair from front to back and Joe was going to snap the shutter in the midst of that motion so that he could catch the perfect shot of the arc of her wet hair. So, not only was her face going to be wet continuously, I also needed to use something that would stand up to a constant submerging and resurfacing. I definitely could have airbrushed her using alcohol based body makeups and the etc, but I don't know, I just kind of get weird around electrical devices and water of any kind...Do you??

After a bit of pre-production troubleshooting, I found the following items to be indispensable to the success of this makeups application and duration:

Products clockwise starting at the bottom:

-Adesign Flat Top Foundation Brush (used to apply the Benefit Benetint)
-Shu Uemura Mascara Basic in black
-Make Up For Ever Aqua Eyes eyeliner pencils
-Dior EyeShow Eyeshadow
-Make Up For Ever Pearly Waterproof Eye Shadow pencil
-Maybelline Superstay lipcolor
-Benefit Benetint rose tinted cheek and lip stain
-Vincent Longo Liquid Canvas Dew Finish Foundation

** I also used eyelashes and waterproof adhesive for obvious reasons. Also, not pictured above again, for obvious reasons.

I apologize for not having makeup shots for this particular blog posting, but, I actually had to get in the water to tend to de-tangling the models hair in between each shot, so I couldn't work and take pics at the same time. Joe did however, get some interesting production shots of me (see below). The shoot was a success as the model was in the water for a little over an hour doing self imposed carnival style dunks and her makeup remained darn near flawless when we wrapped.