A Battle for the Crown

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Themed, Writeup

For this shoot, I wanted to try doing fashion photography, but with an unusual medieval twist. I tried to make it look as “editorial” as possible using poses and lighting appropriate to the theme.

Credits

Models: Christiane Krapf & Natacha Bruder
Makeup and Hair styling: Lily Webb (Beauty Contour)

There may be a few more images from this set posted later this week or next week :)

Click to read the full write-up and see “Behind the Scenes” photos.

Highlights

The highlight of the day would have been the opportunity to work with a great team; the models Natacha and Christiane both looked stunning and Lily’s makeup and hair work was very clean and polished. Everyone was easy to get along with and a pleasure to be around for the day.

We all had a lot of fun on the shoot! The best scene was “The Battle” shot. There were a lot of giggles when Christiane and Natacha went to look into each other’s eyes:

Lily was a fantastic host, letting us use her hours for the shoot, offering us drinks and heating up the party pies I brought along. The makeup was done in her home studio in a room out the back of her house and we used her huge loungeroom for the shoot itself. Lily’s dogs were curious to see what was happening too…

The Photoflex Pro Duty BackDrop Support Kit that I purchased a couple months ago was definitely large enough, very stable and capable. At one point, I tripped over one of the stand legs and to my relief, it didn’t topple over.

Random, long bolts of cloth worked really well for the theatrical look I was going for. Christiane helped me to construct the backdrop using Lily’s black cotton, and my brown suede and red organza. Christiane’s impressive height of 6′1″ definitely came in handy for that ;)

The weaponry was borrowed from my friend Ankur - thanks Ankur! The short swords are Legolas’ from the movie Lord of the Rings. He lent me an extremely cute mini-crossbow which we did not end up using. I also borrowed his extremely large sword, over 1 metre in length.

I was driving past a booze bus on the way home from Ankur’s house with the weapons, hoping the cops would not look into the car and see all the random weapons. I don’t really look like a violent criminal though, they probably would have assumed I was going to go do some Live Action Dungeons and Dragons role play, running after people shouting “DAMAGE 11″.

Lessons Learned

Originally we wanted a funky horsemane / mohawk look for Natacha. Although the length of her hair was perfect for the style, the weight and texture of Natacha’s hair made this style look very different to how we had envisaged it. Natacha suggested crimping the hair, which really improved the look and we just went with that! Next time, I will definitely consider a model’s hair volume, texture and weight before choosing the style.

I coordinated the clothing using a mixture of items from the models’ respective wardrobes and accessories I purchased off ebay. I am glad I went through this process, because I realised the value of having somebody else to help with it. Sourcing pieces of clothing is expensive and/or time consuming. I’d be keen to look into collaborating with a fashion designer or hiring a stylist for a shoot requiring more than one or two outfits.

Almost all of the clothing I liked in the model’s wardrobes was black and unfortunately we also needed a dark backdrop colour to create the right mood. This made it difficult to light the garments of the models (black-on-black). For this reason, I am not sure these photos qualify as fashion, a lot of the detail and silhouettes of the clothing were lost.

However, the contours of the body and face are adequately exposed to my eye and in this scenario, it was an acceptable tradeoff. I achieved some close, clear shots of the makeup for Lily, and also a variety of shots for the models. If I had been shooting for a fashion designer or with a stylist, I would have tried harder to reveal more detail in the clothes.

The shoot took slightly longer than I anticipated, so I cut some scenes from the previously planned sequence of shots on the storyboard. This was necessary, but led to a slightly more disjointed series of images. We were at Lily’s house from approximately 8:30am until 3:30pm shooting these images, and were all pretty tired by the end of it. This is how tired we were ;)

I was experimenting with my coloured gels: they are like cellophane, I put them over the flashes. They did add a lot of mood to the images but I would like to learn to use them in a more subtle, refined way. I was really inspired by some Bvlgari advertisements I have seen in fashion magazines that are very surreal looking with a greenish-blue hue. I suppose that kind of expertise will come with time and experience! Here is a crazy 80s-inspired test shot which did not make the cut:

“Behind the Scenes” shots

These were taken in Lily’s home studio. It was very homely and comfortable :)

Even though I can see room for improvement, overall, I am very happy the way the shoot went and satisfied with the photos. A big thankyou to Lily, Natacha and Christiane! Hope you guys had fun and I’d be happy work with you all again sometime :)

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon
  • Google
  • TwitThis

Tags: , , , , ,

Permalink | August 29th, 2008

4 Responses to “A Battle for the Crown”

  1. Regan Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 7:49 pm

    Oh my god! Christiane is absolutely stunning, so is Natacha but Christiane definately has something about her that is very intriguing.. Awes shoot guys!
    Regan
    xx

  2. sab Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 2:38 pm

    Regan: I agree! Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment :)

  3. Lily Says:
    October 13th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    Hey Sab..
    Thanks for the nice comments.
    Great job to all team member..

    Hihihi.. happy my dog is so popular now.. :)

  4. sab Says:
    October 14th, 2008 at 12:35 am

    Lily: Thanks for dropping by! Your dog is just adorable, hope he doesn’t mind being posted up ;)

Leave a Reply