We couldn’t believe a year had passed already. We packed up all our gear into the car and began our evening drive over to Folkestone.

It was our shoot day for the All Star competition; an annual hairstyling and portraiture competition hosted by men’s hair and skin care brand American Crew. The founder of American Crew, David Raccuglia, is not just a talented barber, he is also a highly skilled, self-taught photographer with a love for classic black and white images; reminiscent of classic 1940-60 Hollywood portraiture. From this combination of photography and mens hair styling skills, American Crew was born and a competition celebrating both of these passions was created.

Last year we came very close to reaching the finals, with our photographs of model Soren Paillou and our good friends at Fella Hair were eager to enter again. This time they had organised two models each with distinctive looks, styled by barbers Alex Wakefield and Jayson Black.

Last years images which made it to the top 20.

The Models and the looks

This year, both barbers had come up with a back story and personality for their look. Jayson styled model George Blake into a Harley Davidson-riding rocker with a glorious beard and a love for rock bars and neat bourbon. Alex had gone for a Mod culture inspired look, a sharp looking young man with a chip on his shoulder portrayed by fashion model Soren Palliou.

The Final images

Here they are! Our final front and side profile shots for the competition:

Soren rocking the Mod look with some amazing textured hair as styled by Alex

George with his glorious beard and hair styled by Jayson

Closing thoughts

Unfortunately our images didn’t make it to the finals this year, but they were spotted on the judging table in one of the videos American Crew streamed and we received some encouraging comments:

We were really happy with our shots and were blown away by the efforts made by the barbers and models. A huge thank you to Alex, Jayson, Bobby, George and Soren. We already can’t wait for next year!

Behind The Scenes

Our basic lighting setup for the shoot was a large octabox as the key light, a small softbox as the hair and rim light positioned behind and a lot of reflected and bounced light was played around with to get the look just right.

Our basic lighting setup

Editing

We were shooting tethered to keep an eye on the images as we went and everyone was pretty chuffed with the shots straight out the camera. After we got home we cracked on with some high end editing. Our workflow was firstly to get the image looking right in Lightroom by adjusting the tones, clarity, highlights and contrast to give them a bit of punch. Then we took them over to photoshop for our high-end final touches. The 3 stages of the images are shown below: