Playboy Playmate – The Softer Sex

I think the above image is one of my favourites from this shoot… This post is the pictorial and behind the scenes story of the PMOY of 2013 for Playboy South Africa.

I shot, location scouted and styled this shoot for Playboy South Africa in early 2013. The beautiful model who won Playboy Playmate of the Year (PMOY) is American born Alexis Fox. We did the pictorial about a 1.5 hours drive out of Cape Town at Theewaterskloof Dam which is half way between Franschoek and Caledon.

I shot, as usual, a series of “PR” (non nude) images and a set of nudes which were published as the main pictorial in the PMOY edition later in 2013.

There’s quite a nice PMOY announcement article on IOL here to have a look at.

I utilised proudly South African made Swimwear brand Coco Lifestyle (now closed so I can’t share a link) and gold-only accessories which included bangles, chunky and long neck pieces and gold leaf adhered to Alex’s body with body oil That was quite a process…see behind the scenes images below of us all trying to get the stuff to stick and having a laugh!.

The whole shoot was done with natural light and one reflector board. The morning started off cloudy and freezing and I was very grateful when it cleared up and warmed up about an hour into our shoot which had started with hair and makeup at 3:30am in Cape Town.

And below is a selection of behind the scenes which gives an idea of how the shoot rolled out. We even got drone stills of our shoot as one of the team on location had a drone with him.

Colleen Van Rensburg (link to her work below) did a beautiful job making Alexis even more fierce and beautiful with her hair and makeup skills.

Below applying gold leaf to Alexis’s bum before we started that set of photos in the late afternoon.

Such a great team working with me on this shoot. hair and makeup by Colleen Van Rensburg.

I was assisted by Mickie (can’t remember her surname!) and Sven Kristian (Sven is now an amazing photographer, see his website here).

In August 2012 I initiated a new series of work, using the Playboy South Africa Playmates, to go alongside a group exhibition called Nostalgia, which I was curating at Exposure Gallery.

The series was shot over two days with six different Playmates. The images catalogued here come from the first shoot on Womens’ Day, 8th August with Yolandi Malherbe, Mpho Tsila and Yolandi Wiggett, – hair by Chantal Morgan and make-up by Colleen Van Rensburg.

A series of shots on the side for Yolandi to post on social media... — A series of shots on the side for Yolandi to post on social media…

The approach for the shoot took a while for me to plan, I wanted the final images to really look like old originals and thus decided to layer the processing of the images.

I shot in studio against a mid-tone grey back-drop roll using two lights; a strip soft box creating rim light and a beauty-dish with a grid as the main light. After retouching and quite substantial colour manipulation (to adjust backgrounds and props appropriately) I overlaid the files with previously documented textures and then had them printed out onto cotton-based Hanhemulle.

I spent a couple of days staining, soaking, burning, crushing, folding and generally damaging these originals until they looked sufficiently handled and then re-documented them on a white background. These files were again re-worked before final exhibition prints were created , again on Hahnemulle.

The shoot was fun and relaxed with bubbly and a few friends coming in to lend a hand or deliver koeksisters (thank you Leigh Van Den Berg, beauty-blogger-extraordonaire of lipgglossismylife) (and also thank- you for the blog post about the shoot!).

Bubbles, hair, makeup, refernces, shooting, nails and friends popping in (thats Yolandi M. top middle, Mpho bottom middle and Leigh Van Den Berg bottom right)

For each of the playmates I worked with I produced a semi-nude final image for the exhibition and a nude for publication in Playboy magazine itself. We also shot one or two fun closer up shots for each Playmate to use on social media.

Great pinup-style makeup done on Yolandi Wiggett by Colleen Van Rensberg.