White Dress Project Studio Shoot 6th November 2013

Four hour studio session at college today.  Started off a bit slowly, but steadily gathered momentum.   Got the remote light triggers working perfectly so we could have a high key lighting setup (sort of thing you see with family portraits, bright white background) at the infinity curve end of the studio and a low key (one or two lights, generally dark background, moody) at the opposite end at the same time with a model at each.

Claire, who had modelled Nicole’s dress at the location shoot was available again, but Sylvia wasn’t.  So i’d arranged for one of my work colleagues, Sarah, to model Gemma’s dress.  Unfortunately I got a very apologetic call from Sarah at 8:30am this morning to say that one of her children was sick and could I possibly find someone else to model. Aggghhh!  I emailed the group and Gemma came back pretty quickly and said her friend Danielle could make it, what a star!

Malcolm, Lindsay and myself got to college around 5pm and started looking at the two lighting setups.  The high key is fairly simple, we used 4 lights, two in front of the model, two behind to light the background.  We set the main ‘key’ light of the front two to be f8, we set the other front light to f5.6 (to get some light shadow and shape to the face and body).  We then set the two lights at the background to f11, to blow it out and make it white.

We then took a look at the low key lighting setup.  As I mentioned in the initial meeting Malcolm had found a picture in a magazine that we all liked and wanted to re-create.  It involved a single light illuminating a model, in front of some patterned wallpaper.  Probably more suited to Nicole’s dress, but we thought it was worth trying with both.  Unfortunately we haven’t got the picture anymore, but it was something like this (except with a female model in a dress in front of patterned wallpaper but the lighting is similar):

Malcolm had been very busy during the week, getting wallpaper samples, getting a preference from Nicole and covering a sheet of 8×4 plywood to bring in as a background.  This was put into position and one of us acted as model to get an initial position and strength for the lighting.  We were ready to go!

By about 5:30, both models had arrived and were changed and made up, so we started to shoot.  This was really difficult!  We needed the wallpapered board to be about 3 times wider.  To get the whole dress in the shoot we had to shoot quite wide, but we were getting lots of ‘rubbish’ in the background, i.e. the rest of the studio.

We didn’t want to move the models any closer to the background, because of shadows, so we tried the model standing in front of one edge of the wallpaper, it works quite well.  But we were also having trouble with harsh shadows from the single light.  In hindsight we probably needed a small light or reflector on the opposite side of the model, to lessen the shadows.

I then went onto the high key lighting setup while Lindsay and Malcolm used the low key.  I was more comfortable with this, there is a lot more scope for movement with less harsh shadows and the worry of a thin background.  I tried some static poses with Danielle:

I was quite pleased with this.  But then wanted to get some movement into the dress, make use of all that material.  For this shot I got Malcolm to throw the dress up into the air and then jump out of shot.

We then swapped and I took a few shots of Claire in the high key setup.  We introduced a clarinet as a prop to start with:

I then asked Claire to use some of her dancing skills and do some Charleston moves:

I did a few closeup shots to show off Nicole’s makeup and headdress:

Finally I did a few more shots in the low key setup, where Lindsay had made some changes and added an orange gel:

Again, there were tricky, there were lots of shadows from the triangles on the front.

Everyone was tired by the end, but enjoyed the evening.  Definitely an experience.  The next time I do this I need to have some more idea’s of poses for the models, there were a few times when I ran out of idea’s and the model was left standing.  Claire and Danielle were excellent, but working with professional models may be easier, they may have idea’s and poses that they can bring to future shoots.

Here is a selection of images from the shoot.  Click on the images for a slideshow and some notes that i’ve made on each one: