So my underwater photoshoots are super fun but there’s only so many times you can put a girl in a floaty dress underwater without it being repetitive.

I took inspiration from my recent bid to create more thriller images. I thought of how I could combine underwater with thriller to create some images that would take a step out of the repetitive thriller images and create something a bit new. No idea if it’ll work of course as again it’s a bit niche but I wanted to try. Often in thriller books something to do with water is about finding a body, drowning, suicide and or murder. So I opted to leave Rosie in ‘normal’ clothes rather than floaty dresses, almost a nod to police officer clothing, shirt, plain tshirt and jeans (not that you can see the jeans much).

Rosie and I had booked a day to shoot anyway, she was feeling a bit fragile after spending the whole weekend with food poisoning so I was glad we had booked a short shoot for her sake bless her, but the pale skin was a bonus! (I’m teasing…ish).

So I bought some rope from a local boating shop… never ending awkward moments in my life trying to explain why I needed 4 lengths of rope to tie someone up and put them underwater…

Shooting and Editing

I had previously explained to Rosie on the way there my ideas and she was on board, happy to play dead for me! The editing, whilst I normally try to normalise the heavy cyan tones, they played to my advantage a little as I wanted her to definitely look as if she was in water. I used the black backdrop (thanks bed sheet!) again so it wasn’t obvious it was a swimming pool but had the suggestions of the ocean or a lake instead. But also graphically they work better on black. Space for type/copy and what not.

I also asked Rosie to splash in as she went under to create more bubbles than usual. Also asked for a few poses from behind too, as if her hands were tied behind her back. The effect, I believe, to be rather effective. Book cover photographs often want models to be anonymous, or semi-anonymous so this pose hopefully will work to my advantage when it comes to selling them for book covers.

I did take my police badge too, hoping for a more prominent story line, I got maybe one or two photos where it was behaving but it kept flipping up into Rosie’s hair and face so it wasn’t as helpful as I had thought but I got a couple of photographs thankfully.