Alright! So here is the part of the website where I need to talk about the inspiration for this photoshoot and how it came to be. The funny thing about this photoshoot is it all just kind of happened.

First of all I need to thank the amazing Mckaylee Callahan for being amazing model for this shoot and really the driver for making this shoot this extra. Lets just say it all began with a sword.

From what started as a fun little quick Victorian style photoshoot quickly snowballed into the very stylized angelic dragon slayer you see here… and it all began in early July 2022.

I had been wanting to shoot a Victorian style scene for quite some time. Probably a few years now… and when I remembered this Yellow dress Mckaylee had sent me pictures of… I knew it was time to do it. Now I know what your thinking… But Cherokee… She’s not in a yellow dress… (Remember… the snow ball). So we set a date that worked with both our schedules and it was time to find the location (Yes I set dates before locations sometimes because I need a little bit of crazy in my life). After a couple of days of not really finding anything and then a 4 day long work trip I still had nothing… and the date was a couple days away. And that is when I discovered The Castle on Stagecoatch. This is primarily a wedding venue and from time to time they have a photographer come out to do location pictures for seniors. Unfortunately they were all booked for the weekend of our shoot. Fortunately being very nice and a little smooth talking later we agreed to book the shoot 2 hours before the venue opened. And thats when I told Mckaylee we booked a castle.

Im not 100% on her side of the story but Mckaylee hit the outfit out of the park… Sometimes you have to gut your curtains to make something amazing.

The photoshoot was hot… it was 98 at 8 in the morning… we shot for 2 hours in the heat and got some really great looking images. I shot on a Sony A7III wit ha Sigma Art 35mm 1.2 Lens for a majority of the shots. I sometimes switched to my trusty 85mm manual lens that can be seen in the 2nd image with the candlestick. I used 2 off camera lights with large octoganal diffusion to try and make the light as soft as possible since I was making a day for night shoot. The hardest part was getting the lighting down to where it was believable moonlight with a mix of fire breathing dragon. In the end I had to use a lot of post processing to get the effect right and still I think it could be better.

After the shoot was finished it was time to post process. I wanted to tell a story of this angelic person was woken by a fire breathing dragon an used some magical powers to destroy it but in the end it all came down to what look most bad ass. SO you can see where we switch between no candlestick, candlestick, sword, then magic.

I used cinema 4d, and cycles 4d to render the wings and dragon then comped everything using photoshop and camera raw. Overall there was lots to be learned from this shoot. (Mostly I need more lights and modifiers) but this is by far one of my favorites to date. So I hope you enjoy Through The Fire.