Outside the Lines: Mens Creative Editorial Photo Shoot – Colorpop 2023

If you haven’t heard of our portfolio-building event COLORPOP for photographers – you’re missing out!!! I’m so excited to start blogging each of the 10 photo shoots we organized for our event as a way to share a little bit more of the planning and behind the scenes process. Plus, these shoots were so cool that they deserve to live somewhere other than Instagram.

Colorpop Portfolio Weekend 2023 took place April 28-30 and May 5-7; over these two weekends, 40 photographers of all skill levels and backgrounds traveled from around the world to Utah. This year, our event was more like a retreat – we all stayed together in a big house, ate together, had educational activities in the evenings, and made lifetime friends and connections. Honestly, it felt like summer camp for photographers – and as a retired camp counselor, it was totally my jam. 😉

For more information on our events, CLICK HERE. We’d love to have you attend one in the future! Now let’s get into this concept.

Photography & creative direction @marinawphoto

Art direction & styling @artdeptcreative

Production @alicebestie

Assistant @sunnyjeephoto

Models @justicecarradine @henryflp7 @talentmg @joyuhs

Event @shotatcolorpop

Click here to watch a behind the scenes video!

For this concept, we wanted to bring line drawings to life by creating 3D shapes. We knew that having a variety of shapes in different colors and forms would be an opportunity for our models to get really creative with posing in between them and allow photographers to interact with them while shooting too.

We landed on using hula hoops as circular shapes, spray painting about 8 of them black. Working as a team during the shoot, we held them up in front of our models from different distances and had them reach through them and hang them from their limbs.

The second shape we made was a red spiral which we made out of rubber tubing from Home Depot. Although it was pretty heavy, our models were able to wrap the tubing around their bodies and spiral it towards the photographers lenses, which ended up getting me my absolute favorite shot from this concept.

Lastly, we made a giant cube out of some lightweight pieces of wood we cut and painted pink. During the shoot, our models got inside the cube, held it up high, sat in it, and our photographers shot from above and below, getting the lines from the sides in their shoots which made for some fun depth.

Here are my shots from both weekends of our event!