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10-17-10 Portfolio Series 2/2 – Phyllis’ Shoot @ South Cedros

October 28, 2010 Nathaniel Kam Photography 1 comment

10-17-10 Portfolio Series 1/2 – Phyllis’ Shoot

Styling and Direction by Nathaniel Kam

Assisted by Sang Han

Make Up by Flawless Beauty San Diego

Looking to gain experience in the photo industry? We are always looking for dedicated 2nd shooters, lighting assistants, and interns.

2010 Portfolio Shoot w/ Phyllis Nguyen - Images by Nathaniel Kam Photography

– 2010 Portfolio Shoots by Nathaniel Kam Photography –

10-17-10 Phyllis’ Shoot 1/2

08-31-10 Kevin and Kelly’s Shoot

05-19-10 Nina’s Shoot

04-05-10 Kelly’s Shoot

04-14-10 Kevin’s Shoot

Finally part 2 of our portfolio shoot with Phyllis! For this one, I really wanted to focus on our color palette and also give it a casual wintery feel to contrast the first one.

2010 Portfolio Shoot w/ Phyllis Nguyen - Images by Nathaniel Kam Photography

The first article I decided on was the hat. The color was just perfect, it wasn’t too bright and definitely worked well with Phyllis’ skin and hair tones. From there we built up the rest of the outfit one piece at a time.

Now since the hat did commit us to the Autumn / Wintery look, a scarf was the next piece to track down.

I settled on the amazingly soft and warm blue wool scarf pictured above. I did look into other fabrics and materials, but since we had the hat already, I definitely felt a wool scarf would keep the look tied together better.

Footwear was also a fun little scavenger hunt, I literally went through every type of boot, flat, and shoe in my head before settling on the boots. That said, nothing says winter to me like a nice pair of boots.

So a bit about the colors for this shoot. This past spring I got really into HGTV, more specifically their design shows, Color Splash with David Bromstad being one of my favorites (I also highly recommend House Hunters). Well taking some of his ideas and theories on interior design in mind I wanted this shoot to really reflect a similar approach to color.

With everything from the clothes to the location we kept mostly to very cool colors, blues, greens, and purples. All except the hat, and that is for a good reason. The hat is our accent piece, the “color splash”. It is meant to pop out of the sea of blues and greens, grab your attention, and bring it in right to our subject.

Slightly more scientifically, the hat is a complimentary color (<-check out the color wheel, it’s pretty cool) to the blues, greens and purples. This means it occupies the opposite side of the color spectrum from blue, green, and purple so it will be the most noticeable against those colors as well as help your brain to “neutralize” out the image (which our brains like).

For these outdoor ones we also made use of our environment to give us some natural frames and color contrasts. Take special notice to the blue door framing our model as well as the contrasting blue sky, red walls, and blue door.

2010 Portfolio Shoot w/ Phyllis Nguyen - Images by Nathaniel Kam Photography

These were some of my favorites, the colors were just amazing. A special thanks to Sang for helping us out on the lights here (it was literally pitch black while we were shooting)