Sitting Pretty: Womens 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

Makeup @amyjomua

Hair @byabimarie_

Model @becca_webb

Event @shotatcolorpop

Click here to watch a behind the scenes video!

Ashley and I have always wanted to do a photo shoot involving lots and lots of chairs. Now this may seem like a simple idea, but sometimes keeping elements like backdrops, props, and wardrobe minimal can lead to the strongest photos. Having more negative space gives the viewer’s eye a place to rest and focus on the emphasis of the image, and this concept in particular allowed us to get really creative with posing.

One of the reasons we hired our talented model Becca was because she has a background in dance, so we knew she could get really creative and bendy with her poses. We asked her to interact with the chairs by weaving herself through them, sitting on them upside down, basically doing any kind of weird pose that you wouldn’t normally do in a chair.

We styled her in a green trenchcoat and purple suit, with her haired pulled back into one of the coolest braids I’ve ever seen.

The only props we needed for this concept were chairs, but we needed a lot of them, and we wanted them all to look different. In order to get a variety of colors, textures, and shapes, it involved a lot of Facebook marketplace hunting paired with many cans of spray paint and lots of reupholstering.

Becca did such an incredible job modeling, the way she interacted with the chairs was SO creative.

Here are my shots from both weekends of our event!