Tasked to create a mock advertisement for clothings, garments, or accessories of any brand for our second year photography class for final exams, we were inspired by the iconic “Girl with Pearl Earrings” painting by Johannes Vermeer. Two other friends and I teamed up for this shoot and created the "Be the Girl" campaign for a local brand (completely unsponsored) that sold a lot of earrings-- pearl earrings among others. I shot the pictures, my friends did the styling and helped with the lighting a little.

The "be the girl" line meant as a kind of push-- a selling point, actually. Because the thing about the original painting was that no one really knew who she was, her name her age, what kind of relationship she had with Vermeer, or even if she was a real person or not. So in a way it was kind of like saying, "if the girl could be anyone— why can’t it be you?". 

Obviously the earrings aren’t exactly the same, but everything else we tried to be as close as possible with the original painting. Because we weren't just selling an earring, we were selling an opportunity, i suppose-- to be this mystery girl from a legendary painting. We pushed the campaign further by taking some extra shots for an added mystery and ambiguity for the identity of the girl. 

These are a couple raw, unedited test shots that i actually ended up liking. We shot this a couple days before the actual shoot and at that time we didn't have the pearl earrings in hand, so we just used some other earrings we had lying around. But basically we were just testing out the lighting, the whole look, what we wanted to try and what not. It ended up looking really great actually, i almost wanted to use photos from this shoot instead haha. These test shots really helped save a lot of time and headache in the actual shoot.

Definitely one of my proudest and favourite works :)