Author Archives: Deea

About Deea

Summer lover.

Cristina // photoshoot

Hey guys! Here I am, continuing with the catching up and posting my latest photoshoots!

This one’s from November 2014, again practicing with studio light (60x60cm softbox and a silver reflector). This time I was aiming for a more soft outcome, matching the beauty of the model and the delicacy of flower. By the way, did you know that this plant, called gypsophila or, more commonly known in English as baby’s breath, is, apparently, extremely expensive?! I was obsessed with using it for a photoshoot and it was quite a pain in the.. you know what, to get just a few branches. The flower shops didn’t even want to sell it! I was imagining filling the frame with it, but I had to improvise with what I had.

Big fat thank you to the beautiful model, Cristina! I love how the images turned out and… I plan to grow my own gypsophila for future photoshoots! 😀

beauty photoshoot

Cyndi // photoshoot

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Hey there! ♥

Caught up in all sort of time consuming activities, I am way behind with sharing around here my photoshoots, but hopefully you’re up-to-date on my facebook page! I also have some good news to share with you, but can’t do it yet, so until then, let’s try to catch up with the photoshoots. 😉

This one dates all the way back to September 2014, when I was trying to get some new results in beauty and portrait photography with studio lighting (one small 60x60cm softbox, placed facing downwards the model and slightly to her left, plus a silver reflector for some shots). Usually, I tend to shoot very bright images, mostly in natural light and using all sorts of lens flare effects, but this time I wanted to try something new, a bit darker, yet still feminine and melancholic.

Last but not least, a big fat thank you to dear Cyndi, the model and also my friend, for her patience and also for her natural beauty. You can’t get a bad photo with such models, can you?! 🙂

Enjoy and scroll down to the bottom for a little surprise. 🙂

cyndi, photoshoot, portrait

MUA: Krisztina Kovacs

Hairstylist: Maria Curta

Aaaand, bam! I’ve created a photoshop action with all the steps I took in achieving this look. If you like it and want to have it… head to this link and get it! Apparently, I’m also making rhymes now :))

Here’s a before and after:

cyndi, photoshoot, portrait

And, until next time: ♥

2014 in review

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Here I am, at the end of the best year so far, with high hopes and expectations for the upcoming new year.

2014 treated me extremely kind and I am so thankful for that. I’m going to repeat myself here, but I guess you already know that I spent half of this year in Spain (yes, yes, I’m in a little post-Spain post-Erasmus depression) where I met some amazing people and had awesome photoshoots, some of them in breathtaking places. Now I miss everything and everyone so much! I can’t even get used to the winter low temperatures back home and thank God in my hometown there’s only sun and no snow. I’m hoping to go back to Spain and I promise to start creating my own opportunities for that to happen as soon as 2015 kicks in!

Back home, can’t really complain! Met new creative people with whom I’ve started collaborating “photographicly” quite constantly and the ideas just keep flowing in a way I can’t even keep up with right now. It’s like an addiction: you get great results from an awesome photoshoot and then you just want more! And honestly, I can hardly wait to shoot again (even if my hard disk is suffering from all the images waiting to be post-processed and shown to the world).

2014 was best of, really.

For 2015, I only wish to shoot more and better imagery. Oh, and graduate from University. I guess this one should go first, on top of everything else. Want it or not, it’s the most important. I’m also having some traveling in mind. Oh, and I should find a job. And… Damn it, I’m starting to make plans again! I’ll just cut it short:

2015, don’t disappoint me (or everyone reading this blog will know!)!

Happy New Year, dear readers! What’s your most cherished wish or hope for 2015?

andreea iancu photography

fairytales 4 // Anamaya

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I’m so excited to share this story with you guys, as it’s one of my favourite from the Fairytales series!

This time I got inspired from a story I read when I was younger about an Inca princess named Anamaya. It was a SF book, with the events taking place sometime during the Spanish conquest. I honestly don’t remember any other detail, nor how the book ends, I just have in mind, very vividly painted, the image of Anamaya, as I imagined it and have been wanting for a long time to actually picture it through photography. So, finally, here it is!

We used some old accessories, transformed with the help of the MUA, the model and some golden paint and spray to make them look like gold. The feather crown was improvised by myself with some cardboard and black feathers, all golden-sprayed. I looked up the internet for inspiration on how such an inca inspired outfit would look like and the feathers seemed to be a recurrent theme (as well as those circular crowns that I didn’t have the skill to reproduce at that moment). However, there’s a lot of confusion on the internet between Inca, Mayan and Aztec and as I didn’t have other more serious sources of research at hand at that time, I decided to rely more on my imagination for this story.

The dress is actually one of my favourite materials I brought from Spain (and already used it in fairytale no. 2). I love using those flowing materials as dresses (I have 4 different colours), as they’re so easy to transform and turn into a different outfit each and every time, depending on what you need.

We shot on an empty field (I wanted to have a feeling of an arid land) on the outskirts, somewhere at noon. It was in October and I didn’t expect to have such a sunny day after having only clouds before, so the light was quite harsh to deal with but we managed with the help of our assistant, Mihai, and a simple silver reflector. I also spent a lot of time on post processing until I got the look and the colours I was after.

Oh, yes, and I experimented again with the mirrors, trying to obtain some surreal effects. I looove this simple tool and the limitless outcomes you can achieve with it!

And, last but not least (actually, the most important part), the model is the beautiful Manuela (who you’ve already seen before) and the great make-up was done by Cristina Foit. I hope you enjoy the photos at least as much as I do! <3

inca princess, photography fairytale

black & white photoshoot

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Back in September I had the pleasure to work with a new model, Manuela, who you’ll see again in the upcoming part 4 of the Fairytales series.

Our first session was a studio test shoot, as I wanted to practice a little more with my 60×60 softbox and 160W flash and, also, I was very determined to shoot black & white portraits. I never shoot black & white, nor I do it in post-processing, so I considered this to be a challenge. Usually, I mainly look at lighting and effects to achieve a certain overall feeling and shooting b&w quite scares m. In b&w the composition plays a very important role along with the light and a correct exposure. You don’t have any distracting colors to hide what might not be 100% right in the other areas.

All I can say was that I loved it! Manuela was also great to work with, posing all the time and coming up with ideas while I was focusing on composition and lighting (it DOES help have a good and confident model). As a result, I had around 200+ images (usually I only hit 100-150) to select from, an awful task to do just because I loved most of them. Good thing that Manuela has a perfect skin, so there wasn’t much post-processing involved (actually, I just did a little clean-up and worked on the lights&shadows and overall contrast).

Plenty of thank-yous go as well to the MUA, Cristina, for doing a great job (at the bottom there’s a colour portrait for her work to stand out as well).

andreeaiancuphotography_2014_1001_wm

I’ve also experimented with textures in post-processing for some of the images, which follow below. In this cases, I used a personal texture of an old wall to give the background a little more detail and to enhance the painterly dark effect I chose to portray. It was more of an unsure “oh, let’s see how it looks with texture” and then a “oh, I love this!” kind of process.

andreeaiancuphotography_2014_1006-2_wm

And below you have a preview of the texture I used for the backdrop. I really hope you like this series! I’d also love to know if you use textures in your post-processing and how do you use them?

old_wall_05_desaturated-BLOG-500-px-wm

fairytales 3 // Lethe

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Part III of the Fairytales project was created during the same photoshoot as part I, the one with Persephone, at the same location and using almost the same props – we just added different accessories, removed the black body and interpreted differently the fabric’s characteristics. For this one we inspired ourselves at first from the legends of the beautiful mermaids, partly human, partly fish, however I’m a bit unsure on how to name this story.

lethe, greek legends,

The thing is that this location with its dark red rocks, being the same as in Fairytales 1, makes me think of Hades’ underworld, the one from the Greek mythology, and not of a siren’s story. So I thought a nymph would be a better fit, therefore I looked up some descriptions and found Lethe, the spirit of the river with the same name, one of the 5 circling Hades and thought it’s a good fit.

So meet Lethe, the spirit of forgetfulness, oblivion. It is said that the souls had to drink from Lethe’s river to forget their past lives.

mermaid legend, greek mythology, lethe

Anyway, I am open to suggestions in regards to the name and character of this Fairytale. If you know any nice mermaid tale, let me know and I will consider it!

mermaid legend, greek mythology, lethe

Model: Maria Avila

MUA: Gloria del Hoyo

Assistant: Andra Oana J.

fairytales 2 // Tyene

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Here goes part II of my Fairytales photo project, trying to illustrate one of the characters from the ultra-popular Game of Thrones series. Now, let’s make this clear from the start: I didn’t read a single line from the books (although I intend to finish them until the end of this year, let’s see how that goes), I have only seen all the seasons (and lived every scene with my eyes stuck to the screen or just shouting and swearing each time a dear character died – which could easily mean a few times per episode).

And I made this clear because Fairytales II illustrates Tyene Sand, one of Oberyn’s daughters from Dorne (which by the way, did you already know it was going to be filmed in the Real Alcazar of Sevilla? HOW AWESOME IS THAT? Haha, I have visited Dorne before it was cool!).

So, the thing is that I saw Zeynep’s photos in my news feed and wanted so badly to photograph her. Tried my luck, wrote her, accepted and just 2 days before her flight back home we were rushing through Sevilla’s heat to find a shadowed place for a few beauty test shots. Due to the lack of time to think about a nice story for the photoshoot I resigned with the idea that I’ll capture just simple portraits of Zeynep. However, I brought some of the recently bought fabrics, just in case. Gloria, the MUA, saw the dark burgundy colour of the fabric and thought of a gold make-up to go with it.

From then on, we started to improvise. We improvised on the spot a dress from the fabric (and had to compose two images in post-processing to have it look so long and flowing, as it wasn’t long enough for the model’s height) and a forehead accessory from Zeynep’s necklace.

And after the very first captures, while reviewing them on my camera, I couldn’t stop noticing a little Game of Thrones feeling, maybe due to the overall colours, or the background, or the model… What’s for sure is that I knew this photoshoot will transform into the second part of my project and that it’s going to picture a character from Game of Thrones.

But what character? I knew I wanted her to be from Dorne, because I imagine the place pretty much with those golden colours, with an exotic feeling, just like Sevilla is. And what other better reason than the fact that Sevilla’s Alcazar will be it’s setting?

So I had to do a bit of research and what caught my eye was the character of Tyene Sand, from Sunspear (capital of Dorne), who is described as looking sweet and innocent but is powerful and treacherous. And Zeynep is just so beautiful and can easily go from a range of expressions, from innocence to pride, from fragility to boldness.

Yup, I think she would be a great fit for this character. I would love to see her act in the series, as she is also an upcoming actress and I’m sure she’d do a great job.

If you already read the books and know more of this character, I’m curious to hear your thoughts!

Model: Zeynep Tugce Bayat

MUA: Gloria del Hoyo

Assistant: Andra Oana