Final Year: 18/10/2019: Clones pt.1 (location)

For this series of work i have named ‘Clones’, I have collaborated with fashion communication students Jessica Campbell, Annie Haggar, Alice hendry and Ellen Parr. The girls contacted me in need of two shoots, part 1 being a series of location fashion images. 

The brief

• Consisting of three locations,  gym,  classroom and Northern tea house cafe. 
• Based on a look book/magazine targeted at bringing attention to the clones of girls being created due to the pressure of social media in modern society. 
• Models will all be n matching garments to represent cloning.

Campaign reference the girls referred to for styling of the shoot was the the season 6 yeezy campaign in 2018. (see image below) This series consisted of fashion icons and celebrities dressed in the yeezy collection worn by Kim Kardashian (reality star) shot in the same posing/similar surroundings. The collection of images were shot by paparazzi gaining them free advertisement. This reference helped me massively in influencing my shooting technique for this shoot, as I now knew to use flash photography to capture the style they were looking for.

First location: The gym

Problems

• The celling was quite low so was difficult to not capture it in the images, and the space was quite small.
  
• images kept turning out with a blue tone, so i had to mess around with getting to know my camera settings half way through the shoot and find the white balance settings, so a top tip would be to make sure you check this prior to the shoot.
  
• Flash was abit over powering for the envrioment, should probably have used external lighting kit next time and visited the location prior to prevent these issues from occurring. 
  

successes

• I was able to edit any mistake that where made in camera, through photoshop and save the images.
  
• lessons were taught e.g. visit location prior to shoot!!
  
• The images did look paparazzi styled as asked of by the client. 
  

Second location: NTH;

Problems

• Again flash was quite harsh, so would bring external lighting next time to avoid this. (however this look was asked for by the client just personal preference in my opinion).
  
• We should of filled the tea cups to make it look less staged and more realistic (even though clearly staged its the little details that count).

Successes

• Theres a quite clear narrative in the images and follows the context of the brief.

Third location: classrooms;

Problems

• The space was bit too open and didn’t really capture what we was initial going for.

Successes

• Had to get more creative so got some cool product shots from this location.
  
• Good natural light coming through the windows,creating nice lighting in the images and making flash look less harsh (removing gradient). 

Overall this shoot was really helpful for me in my progression of my portfolio, as it made me realise that i can not rely on flash for every location shoot. Although flash did fit the theme for the brief, i personally would still have preferred more controlled lighting in the imagery. but I’m still happy with my outcomes and its helped to progress my skills further, as location imagery is most defiantly at this point my weaker point in my practice. 

lessons learnt:

• Always visit the location before hand
  
• Don’t rely on flash bring external lighting 
  
• Don’t rush take your time and get to know your camera before hand 

If you’ve made it this far thanks for reading and hopefully this
helps anyone else wondering about how to approach location shoots!