Fashion shoot for 3rd Year

A couple of weeks ago I was approached by a third year fashion promotion student looking for a photographer to set a photo shoot to capture chosen clothing for her final fashion campaign for Grazia. Although very busy with my own units of work I was very keen to do this shoot as I was recommended and she was willing to give me a chance even though I did not have any portfolio of studio work to show her yet.

Tara Martin wanted really simple lighting seen in studio fashion shoots you would usually see in advertisements so I chose to use two lights reflecting off polyboards onto the backdrop and a large softbox straight in front of the model to give an even light over the whole scene. I used a Canon 5D to give me high quality images while allowing me to move easily while shooting.  

Polyboard & lighting set-up

 

 

Softbox set-up

Tara also wanted to use a variety of backdrops to experiment with what worked best with the clothing. We started with 'cappucino' which was between cream and beige which we used to create a vintage, 'English rose' look. We also used a blue to try out more vibrant colours to try and enhance the colour tones of the clothing & finally we changed to a yellow/orange background to relate to the Grazia colour scheme. 

Before the shoot, Tara showed me a series of different references where the models were both stood still as well as moving to enhance the clothing in different ways. So during the shoot we just tried out different ideas as we went along as we had plenty of time to experiment.

 

 

 

Using wind machine to create movement

I had the brilliant support and help from the lovely Sacha Stevenson who photographed the set, process and progress throughout the fashion shoot as well as helping me to decide and set up the lighting and choose & put up the backdrops when they needed changing.  
During the shoot I managed to shoot over 900 images so after the photo shoot we loaded them on to my hard drive and I gave Tara plenty of time to look through them and choose her favourites for me to edit. She was particularly taken by a mirrored effect seen in a campaign as well as simple editing and this other edit where a series of images are merged together to create the look of movement to show off the shape and movement of the clothing.
When editing the images, other than the photographs where I merged different shots of the model together I simply used curves and clone stamp to minutely enhance contrast and colour as well as tweak lose hairs etc.      
These are just some of the images that I edited to allow Tara to choose a selection from them for her campaign:

 

 

 

 

I am really pleased with the results from the shoot and I think Tara certainly was too. She was so pleased with the results she also asked me to edit some other images she had previous had shot as well as removing the background colour from her campaign logo.
Once Tara has finished producing her campaign publication I look forward to seeing my images in their final form and I will hopefully be able to upload them on here.