I recently did a shoot with on behalf of Manchester Fashion Network for a brand called Stone-Dri. The brief was simple ‘street style’ and near the offices of MFN for ease and practicality. We used the rather handsome Sam Ferns to model, the expertise of John-Paul to style him, and Katrina Urwin from MFN overseeing. We had about 20 outfits to get through and needed 5 usable photos for each one – and about 7 hours to do it in. So about a 100 usable photos in total. Katrina also wanted to mix up the locations a bit too. Unsurprisingly today was not a day for complicated light setups. Which was fine as Katrina wanted them to look as if they were taken in natural light. In fact the photo above was taken in natural light only. More on light in a minute though. The day went well, we alocated 10-15 minutes for each outfit and then moved on to the next one. It was pretty intense as i was choosing locations as we went along. It would have been nice to have a few planed in advance but I had no idea really what the light would be doing on the day which is kind of mainly what i look at when choosing locations. As it turned out the light was dim and coming from everywhere! It was great working with a stylist like Jon-Paul – he put some great outfits together and although he paid attention to detail he didn’t fuss too much which could have been disastrous with the time we had.
Hit the jump to see more pics and get the geeky lighting stuff…
Geeky Lighting Stuff:
I kept a couple of speedlights in a softbox for when the light was a bit flat to help the ambient along. I didn’t underexpose the ambient (much) and just used the softbox to add a bit of directional light for interest and shape. The result was nice but natural looking light that was transportable. If I remember rightly I had the lights on either 1/4 or 1/8th power most of the day. I had two speedlights in the softbox so I could have both at half as much power as I would have needed with one, which gave me half the recycling time and twice the battery life. Its worth mentioning that a couple of speedlights, even with a stofen diffuser and in quite a large softbox will quite happily overpower the daylight on an overcast gray english day. No problemo. I have found grey english days provide great fill light, but the lack of direction can make the light flat and boring – thats when its nice to get out some of my own light.
