Fashion Editorial Test Run
When we have an assignment, I like to have a back up in case the main idea doesn’t work out. I do some test shots/practice and if they’re good enough, I can submit them if need be.
At the moment my ‘good’ camera is back with Nikon getting some work done so I’m using a much older camera for things. Ideally I would wait until I get the better camera back as there are various advantages with that camera but as I don’t know how long that will be, I don’t want to be wasting time when I have the opportunity to get something done. So this would be a test run of the camera as much as anything else. The poorer autofocus and smaller RAW files make things a little trickier to work to my normal standard.
Natalie here is a work colleague. We had done some stuff together last year for the natural light brief. She would be in town for an interview so I thought it’d be a god chance to do something with her dressed for that.
The location is my mother’s house. It has a huge skylight which provides loads of natural light to the hall upstairs. It was raining and my mother is in London so it was the ideal location.
As she was heading to an interview, I couldn’t really have her do much in case it made a mess of her hair or dress. And the dress itself was quite restrictive so poses were limited as well. Though it was smart and gave off a certain feeling of
So I settled for a sort of ‘First Lady’ style theme and took it from there.
The camera was ok but did struggle to fine tune focus so I used manual focus more than I would normally do in this kind of situation. This slowed things down to a pace I wasn’t used to.
Had we had more time to experiment I would have brought in a flash or two and shot it through the gaps in the bannister to cast shadows onto Natalie but as I mentioned earlier we were pressed for time. So I simply used the natural light of the skylight (and bright walls) for the source. We also moved downstairs where there is a large window with curtains which gave us the opportunity to play a bit more with the direction of the light by using the curtains as flags.
For post processing, I went with my usual desaturated look with green/blue hues. There is no skin retouching on these. I would only really get into that if I decided to use these for my submission.
As a practice run, I think they went well enough. On a couple of the photos (4th one in this set) the focus was missed which would make that unusable by magazine standard. Hopefully by the time I do my planned shoot I will have my new camera available to me which will bypass that problem. The final shoot, should it go to plan will be similar in that it’ll be on stairs next to a large set of windows so I will have similar issues to overcome. It will however offer similar opportunities as I can use the different levels in the location to create different shots with continuing themes.
