Tag Archives: fashion

Fashion Test – Bryony

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Here are some shots from a fashion photography test with Bryony from Oxygen Models. I’d arranged a stylist & make-up artist, then unfortunately the first model of the day was ill. Happily, Bryony stepped in & did a fantastic job. I think everyone appreciates how important a make-up artist is for a good shoot, but a stylist makes a shoot stand out from the rest. The good ones just see things that the rest of us might miss & give the photos something extra. Jakki was fabulous & I hope I get to work with her again.

Styling: Jakki Degg
Make-up: Tamash Sharkan

Fashion Test – Chloe T

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I always like to find time for some testing each month; my paid work doesn’t allow me to try out new ideas too much, & I feel the need to keep creative.

These shots are from a fashion test with Chloe T from Oxygen, shot at my place in Central London. Shooting fashion is quite different for me as I’ve spent most of my photography life exploring the interplay of light on skin, & lighting clothes is a very different discipline.

It’s really important when fashion tests to have decent clothes, & I was lucky enough to get Jakki Degg to come & style the shoot. She’s really creative & has a fantastic collection of outfits, I’d highly recommend her to anyone looking for a stylist.

Make-up by Tamash Sharkan

Shoot – Simona Ehmann

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I recently booked a hotel room for a couple of shoots; I spend the majority of my time shooting from my home studio so it’s always nice to get out & try glamourous new locations. Simona’s an outstanding model, some of my favourite fashion shots from my own work have been with her. With someone who really knows what they’re doing I can focus on the lighting, which is important as it’s kind of the point of the test.

The trick to getting great indoors shots is to balance the studio lights with the ambient light in the room. This can be difficult as studio flashes are far more powerful, even at their lowest setting, than a bedside lamp, To get round this, you can either use a slower shutter speed to let more light in, cover the flash with something to reduce its power, or, as I did here, just use the modelling lights. It’s not the most elegant solution of the three, but it does have the advantage of balancing the colours, as the lamp is much more orange than the flash, but the same colour as the modelling light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The same technique was used here. Hotels are usually pretty good at lighting their best rooms, so I find it an advantage to capture the light as it’s meant to be seen.

For this shot I used ring flash. I’ve never been a fan of it, but it does look pretty cool with fashion models. For me it only really works when the model is right up against the background, as I don’t like the way it lights furniture (this is why I’m not keen on using it much).

 

 

 

 

As there’s no ambient lighting in this shot, I fired the flashes for a change. I’ve added some vignetting as it focusses the attention on Simona & breaks up  the plain wall a little.

 

 

 

Finally, if there’s window light, I’ll always try and get a natural light shot. This room had a small window with hardly any light, so the best way to use it was to have her facing the window. I wanted to use the desk furniture, and by shooting from behind & into the mirror I managed to make the most of the natural light & also get the desk in. Shooting into mirrors brings its own problems, not least photos of me in the reflection, but this small mirror made it easy to fill the picture with the model so you don’t see too much of the room. Generally six inches out of shot lies a big pile of lights, camera bags, make-up artists, & various other messes, making it hard to find space for a shot without having to worry about what’s being relfected behind you as well!

Shoot – Josie Anderson

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On the odd occasion that we do get a rare sunny day, there’s a beautiful park behind my house, so I’m always keen to run out & take a few shots whenever the weather allows, & whenever the model has some clothing other than underwear :) Naturally lit outdoor shots are after all where I started, on the beaches of Gran Canaria back in 2005.

My local park has a great combination of grass & meadow, some really old brick walls, great trees, an amazing 300 year old church, & plenty of squirrels (not pictured, I’m still trying to train them to pose). It’s perfect in the early morning, but gets a bit busy in the afternoon, & we inevitably attract an audience of teenagers, which gets somewhat distracting. Why is it that strangers will happily ignore you completely on the tube but feel free to interrupt a photoshoot? Perhaps I should try shooting on the Central Line :)

Anyway, here’s Josie. Redheads are always my favourite & she was great to work with, we’re currently setting up an indoor shoot to suit the current weather.

TG Edinburgh June 2012

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I took some photos at TG on a recent trip to Edinburgh. It’s a fabulous crowd up there, really friendly & with some amazing outfits. The venue’s the best I’ve ever seen for a club, all the walls are hundreds of years old & the lighting’s fantastic so it makes for some great photos.

Lots of photos of Edinburgh itself & A great Kabarett night to come in future blogs.

Shoot – Jakki Degg

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Jakki Degg Nude in the WindowI’ve shot Jakki a number of times over the last few years, & she’s always great to work with. She has the best wardrobe of any model I know & always brings great styling ideas along with her. So I’ve started by ignoring the large suitcase she brought & shooting her naked apart from my own hat :)

She does actually have a fabulous pair of shoes on, as you’ll see in the next shot.

 

 

 

Jakki Degg Nude in the WindowAnother simple window shot with natural light, note the amazing shoes! It really would’ve been a crime not to get those in shot somewhere, & it’s a measure of just how fabulous they are that my eyes go straight to the shoes despite Jakki having forgotten to put any other clothes on! :)

 

 

 

 

Jakki Degg SwimsuitPhotography101: When shooting reflective surfaces, make sure you’re not in the reflected part of the shot! My failing to spot myself would have ruined this as a commercial shot, but makes for a lovely Facebook cover shot.

Jakki Degg SequinsWe’d aimed to use this in black & white, as we felt the gold sequins of the jacket, & the silver ones of the cushion would clash, but I really like it in colour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jakki Degg Circus

Clearly a circus theme going on here, I didn’t like the original much, but with a lot of processing I thought it came out looking interesting. With the flashes going off in my face I now understand how it feels for models on a daily basis! We had a completely different shot in mind, which didn’t work out as well as hoped, I’m very glad we tried this instead.

 

 

 

 

Jakki Degg ItalyI love the way this shot has a Mediterranean feel about it, as if it was shot on the steps of an Italian piazza, rather than Shadwell :)

To be fair, it’s a pretty spectacular building, a church built in 1741, so we really should be able to get some half-decent shots around it!

 

 

 

Beauty Shoot – Caroline Royce

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These images are from a beauty test shoot I did recently with Caroline Royce. The lighting set up I used had four lights, a beauty dish above & to camera left, a gridded soft box to camera right, a honeycombed snoot as a hair light, & a honeycombed reflector to light the background. It’s pretty standard, I found it on the internet myself the first time I used it.

The thing I find with lighting is that you can only get a very basic idea from books or the internet, if you set up exactly as they recommend, it’ll probably still look rubbish at first for the room & model you’re using at the time, so you always have to tweak it to get the desired result. Then, when you get some photos you’re happy with & think you’ve cracked it, another model comes in the next day with different skin tone & you have to start all over again.

I’m testing a lot with lights at the moment (if you’re an outstanding model & would like to test, please see this previous post), & what I hope to achieve is to get to a place where:-

a) Whenever the lighting looks wrong, I instinctively know how to correct it i.e. which lights need moving, or turning up/down. I’m improving vastly at this, but there’s still a certain amount of trial & error involved.

b) Ultimately, I’d like to be able to see any photo in a magazine, know how it was lit, & be able to reproduce it. This might take some time, as magazines can use some pretty complicated lighting set ups, but I intend to have fun trying :)

In these shots, the first one was there very first shot of the day, I hadn’t changed the camera settings from the previous day’s (natural light) shoot, so it’s very overexposed, & Caroline wasn’t even posing, but there’s something I like about it, so I’ve included it anyway. Sometimes interesting things can happen if you deliberately make things wrong (though this was an accident) & also by post processing in different ways, but I’ll be exploring that more in a subsequent post.

For the other shots, we tried to make it a little more interesting than just a straight head shot, by adding the tiara, mirrorball, fur & fluffles we had a range of textures against the skin. The fluffles are an underskirt belonging to Vina Green, she’s a writer & a very good one, you can check out her work here.

My favourite shot here is the one with her eyes closed, blowing a kiss. It shows off the make-up (& Caroline!) really nicely, while adding a sense of fun, & the fluffles suggest she’s in a bubble bath & blowing the foam. To me, anyway :)

Model: Caroline Royce
Make-up & Hair: Charlotte Fisher

Airfield Fashion Shoot

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This Fashion TV shoot was notable largely for providing the only video of me on youtube (I *think*!) It was fun shooting somewhere different, & the old planes were pretty spectacular, though finding a decent backdrop with blue sky & no building works proved tricky.

YouTube Preview Image

Model: Lara Accison
Hair & Make-Up: Natasha Daniel
Styling: La Belle Neri

Favourite Beach Shots

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First in a series of posts showcasing my favourite shots from my own work. I’m starting with some oldies from my Gran Canaria days….these were all shot between 2006 & 2008, so my style has evolved quite a bit since then!

Sooo many people asked me if we used a trampoline for this shot! Abigail’s on top of a sand dune, & I’m slightly downhill from her so she looks higher than she is. A lot of girls wanted to copy this shot, but you really need a dancer’s poise to pull it off. & it took a *lot* of attempts to get this one shot!

 

Possibly my favourite beach shot. The sky behind Rachel is such an amazing shade of blue (a polarising filter helped with that), the sea looks gorgeous, & the palm trees in silhouette really finish it off. Oh & Rachel looks pretty awesome too!

 

Susan Gossage was one of the first fashion models I shot, & it was great to have someone posing in a different way from what I was used to, it gave a very different vibe to the shots. Taken around sunset to get those fabulous shadows & ripples across the dunes.

 

 

 

 

 

Another very early shot from 2006 of Kayliegh Page. She’s a dancer, which meant she could hold this great body shape for just long enough to get this shot. It’s another one that the next 20 girls who came out all wanted their own version of, which led to much hilarity & falling over #neveraseasyasitlooks.

 

 

This shot of Kayleigh Pearson was taken at sunrise. It’s really only worth trying the beach shots at sunrise & sunset, certainly Gran Canaria. You can get away with the light till around 10am, then it’s just too fierce (& the beach is full of tourists). In the afternoon there’s a heat haze which makes the colours feel washed out, so I used to go out an hour or so before sunset & find a nice shady spot, & then hit the beach for the spectacular sunset…

 

 

…& Gran Canaria does have some spectacular sunsets. Love the reflection in the water here & the palm trees against the orange sky. It’s actually pretty cold at 9.30pm when you’re wet & mostly naked, Carrie Spencer did a grand job fighting off the goosebumps!

Another shot of Carrie, on the same beach much earlier in the day. There were tourists all around us, I’ve had to retouch a few background swimmers out, plus a breakwater that took up the whole right side of the photo.

This may have been the day I realised that black & white arty nude shots were what really inspired me. This one’s still on my living room wall today.

 

 

This shot of Gemma was taken near sunset on top of a sand dune. Tricky but important things to get right in this type of shot are the hair, which really needs someone adjusting it every time she moves, & the arching. All photos need a bit of arching, it makes for great curves & is really flattering.

 

A shot of a boy to finish, everything seemed to work about this picture, the bronzed skin, the blue sky, the turquoise sea & I love the glint of sunlight on his breast bone.

 

 

Which is your favourite?

More beach shots here

That’s it for the beach, more favourites categories coming soon x