Jane Bronwyn and I met at a previous collaborative photo-shoot where we captured some themed glamour shots for her Everchange clothing line and to improve our portfolios along with a few other designers, models and hair and makeup artists (See my previous Day of the Dead [Dia de los Muertos] post). She had recently asked me to photograph her new ‘Artistic Dimensions’ collection, I was honoured and grateful for the opportunity to say the least. In my humble opinion, her creative designs are an infusion ranging from raw, gritty but glamorous and chic with a bit retro and contemporary (See the Everchange collections here). Photographing her designs are fun and interesting, they are stylish and look fantastic in real-life and on camera/computer.
Location
The photo-shoot took place at the White House Institute of Design using their white-walled industrial-chic style catwalk room as a studio and then later on we went for a short walk (painful for the models, who were in high heals) outside for some location shots in the late afternoon sun. We settled on a location that had a lush wall of climbing evergreen plants. The wall made an interesting back drop for the models to do their thing.
Setup and gear
I got to use different light sources and locations to achieve different looks for the 4 gorgeous models and their ‘Artistic Dimensions’ outfits. All of the shots in the studio used natural light for back (rim) light mixed with the indoor cool-white lamps, while the outdoor shots needed a reflector to bounce the late afternoon sun to fill-light onto the models.
My one and only Canon 50D was the weapon of choice, with the battery-grip (which is always on there), it was in-valuable because of all the portrait-oriented shots I required to take, and made it much more convenient for setting the manual controls. The lenses I brought along were the Canon 16-35mm F2.8L and my Canon 70-200mm but the 16-35mm stayed on the camera the whole time because I was doing alot of full-body shots and didn’t have enough space to use the 70-200mm (112-320mm on cropped camera) nor the time to change lenses because we were on a tight schedule and I wanted to keep the shots consistent.
On-camera and wireless off-camera speed-lights were used but I wasn’t too successful with those shots as they cast undesirable harsh shadows and I preferred the softer natural and available light, opting to raise the ISO for the indoor shots.
During the outdoor shoot, the sun was behind the evergreen wall, therefore casting a shadow and requiring the reflector to bounce the late afternoon sun onto the subjects. While I was doing the shooting, we had a volunteer assistant (one of the model’s friends) hold up the reflector for me. we tried the silver side and the effect was too metalic and shiny, then we tried the white side and it was unnoticeable, because where my assistant had to hold the reflector was too far away to light up the subjects. Eventually I chose to use the gold side as this gave a rich warm-colour cast onto the green leaves and models skin. At times the effect of the colour cast was too strong and made the post-editing process a bit longer. This required desaturating some yellow and orange colours from the overall image to balance out the tones.
The Results
You can see that I have chosen a few different post-editing styles to showcase my diverse skill set, from contemporary editorial to classic black and white. Some colour accenting black and white shots were used too, but I’m not sure if the client will like it. I really like all the styles presented here. And it will be up to the client to let me know which style I should do for all of them, or make some adjustments or simply keep them the way they are.
Photo credits:
Designer: Everchange by Jane Bronwyn
Models: Katrina-Leigh Beasley, Rebecca Marie Zetterlund and Jasmine Hilder.