4 Models. 3 Huskies. 7 Assistants. Clothing, Make-up, Hair, Prop Stylist and a New Camera System. This shoot was just screaming to be filmed for a BTS on our DVD! That’s when we contacted Jay Espinal who came out to shoot for us on my Fall Fashion Shoot for Kurv Magazine. Check out the teaser video above to get an inside look at a segment from the DVD and read the full story below to see what my thoughts are about shooting with the new PhaseOne IQ!!
Shooting for the November Men’s Issue of Harper’s Bazaar Arabia
It’s such an incredible feeling when you really click with an art director or a fashion editor. It’s a rush, in fact. And that’s the way it feels when I work for Sally from Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. I am always excited for another opportunity to work with her again, we just have a mutual love for fashion and we are on the same page, aesthically! So when I got her email back in July about this men’s shoot, I was thrilled! There was about a 3 week lead in before she actually landed in LA so the first thing we started doing was looking for the perfect model and since we were also shooting the cover, the casting was very important!
Seeing the Final Image Before You Capture It…
Someone asked me an important question at my last LA Workshop and I thought I would share the answer with my readers here. The question was: when I have an assignment, do I know what I want the finished image to look like before I go to the shoot or do I just wing it the day of the shoot? I’m going to use this recent swimsuit editorial as a perfect example on how most of the time I know exactly how I want the final image to look before I ever pick up a camera to shoot it.
“Princess of Persia”
In my last post I wrote about how I was able to prepare for my Genlux editorial weeks in advance. I met with the set designer, we went back and forth deciding on the right props, Stephen and I scoured model submissions looking for the perfect model, etc, etc. For the first of two Harper’s Bazaar Arabia shoots that I did in Dubai, I had no clue who, what or where we were going to be shooting. So now you can see how sometimes I get a lot of lead time to really prep a shoot. And sometimes, I don’t get any time at all to prep. And it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, I still have the same responsibility to produce great images for my client. With this Harper’s shoot, I met with Sally Matthews, the fashion editor, the day before we worked together. I met her at her office and she showed me a few mood boards, which she emailed to me later so I could have them to refer to in the evening before the shoot. In her office, she showed me the models she was deciding between, some of the clothing and she pulled up the location on the internet. Sally procured the Banyan Tree Al-Wabi for our location. The Banyan Tree is a brand new 5 star luxury resort located about 45 minutes outside of Dubai and we were the first official fashion shoot to take place there. From the website I could see the place was gorgeous! But most of the pictures showed the rooms, and most of the shots were taken at night. There were no real good pictures of the outdoor area in the day time, the area that I would be shooting in. I knew that I would have to really scout out the location once I got there and banking on the hope that make up and hair would take a few hours, I could use that time to plot out a shot list while combing the grounds for “photogenic” areas to shoot in.
Genlux Spring Editorial and Video
Got a call from Stephen in January asking me if I wanted to shoot for the Spring issue of Genlux. The theme was Royal. I’ve had this idea in my head that would need a set designer. I wanted to have someone build a room from scratch to emulate the attic room from “The Little Princess”, a novel written in 1904 by Frances Hogdson Burnett. I read the story when I was a kid and the imagery described in the novel left an impression on my imagination. Of course I didn’t know when I read the novel at 9 that I would be producing a fashion shoot around the story some 35 years later!!! But immediately when Stephen said “the theme is Royal”, my mind went straight to the story of The Little Princess. The first thing I did was contact a set designer to see if he was available to do the shoot and if he wanted to work on it with me. Jamie Dean agreed to meet with me at my house so I could show him some visuals and we could talk about the kind of set I wanted built and the props I wanted to use. He brought his laptop and showed me his inventory of props while we went through images that I had collected before our meeting that depicted the mood I wanted to recreate for my shoot. Once he agreed to work on the shoot with me, I collected all the images together from his props to the images I had collected and we narrowed the look down so I could create a mood board to send to Stephen.
