Pro tip: Find yourself a talented makeup artist and model with great skin when you are planning to shoot beauty portraits.

When you are shooting photography for beauty in particular, it is very important to choose a model with great skin and a makeup artist who understands skin because it greatly reduces your retouching time in post processing.

One of my favorite makeup artists that I love to work with in Grand Rapids is Josh Thiel. He has an amazing ability to make skin still look like skin and truthfully makes my life 10x easier. He never overwhelms the skin with too much foundation because believe it or not, it’s harder to retouch skin when there is too much foundation on the skin.

Our model Kim had amazing skin and wore the makeup well. The reason why it is important for the model have certain features and/or have great skin is because we shoot beauty with a 100mm Macro lens. What this means is it picks up and magnifies every single detail on your face.

As a model, you can help by doing things like getting your brows cleaned up or getting a dermaplane if you are able to. If you are not able to, I would suggest to gently exfoliate your skin prior to your shoot + properly moisturize your skin. Because the 100mm Marcro lens picks all these details, it is very easy for the photo to magnify any unwanted skin texture, facial hair, and ect.

Follow those tips and your photographers, makeup artists, and retouchers will love you forever.

Luckily, I was able to work with a super talented team to produce these images that we are all proud of. My favorite set from this session has to be the blue background with the Coca-Cola. I wanted the beauty campaign to look very commercial and I think we definitely executed that theme well.

Which set is your favorite?