Due to a flurry of commercial and PR freelance shoots in recent weeks there hasn’t been much time for blogging but while archiving some images I thought a couple of a local burlesque star should be brought to your attention.
I’ve worked with burlesque and gogo performer Tuesday Lavaeu on numerous occasions over the past few years and have provide a great deal or the promotional imagery. She’s one of the region’s best known performers as can be seen regularly headlining shows in the UK and internationally in New York and New Orleans. She also edits an increasingly-read Burlesque website/ezine called Coochie Crunch. A lot of you ask me about my burlesque photography and you can gain an insight into that stuff here.
Tuesday’s a big fan of campy 1950s scream queen Vampira, AKA Finnish-American actress Maila Nurmi. Nurma created Vampira initially as televisions first horror hostess and portrayed her again cult Ed Wood classic film Plan 9 from Outer Space and was billed as Vampira again in the The Beat Generation where she plays a beatnik poet.
To get the right feel we used a local graveyard and here’s a couple of the resulting images. The set-up was very simple and guerilla and the whole thing was done in around 30 minutes flat – for lighting it was simply a Canon 580ex flash through an adapter through a Bowens Softlite reflector mixed with the ambient light darkened to give a more ‘evening’ feel, even though we were shooting mid-morning.
Tuesday also had a new Christmas act lined-up and I also shot a few studio images of this too.
While we’re talking things burlesque-related, a couple of my images have been used on a charity breast cancer charity by Welsh producers The Bluestocking Lounge, headed by Lilly Laudanum. It’s for a great cause so go and buy one over at their website.
