These are some images from a last minute shoot for the Mikayla Ja fashion label the day before their launch night at the Sydney Fashion Forward Festival held in Paddington Town Hall. The dress was originally designed for an underwater fashion shoot but with delays with acquiring the underwater camera housing due to the erupting volcano in Iceland( Eyjafjallajökull for those that can say it) , we decided to use another concept I was previously playing with.

That idea was to have an ornate furniture setup in a field of long summer grass or such with a model in period dress interacting with the scene and possibly a prop such as a lace parasol, fan or mask. We did change the idea a little the day before with planning as finding some of the props, furniture originally imagined would have taken too long. Luckily I already had a few pieces of old furniture around the house passable for the theme though not perfect. We ended swapping the lace parasol for large black helium balloons which I quickly sourced from Discount Party Warehouse in Auburn just before the shoot. We had the gorgeous Jenna Moss to wear Mikayla Ja’s creation and Joanne Candelaria who always does a great job working on hair and makeup.

We did a convoy drive along a road between Cranebrook and Castlereagh that we had previously scouted until the designer found a spot she was happy with. We had about an hour left with Jenna so had to quickly setup and try to shoot our concept. The day being fairly windy I was limited in what I could safely light the scene with once the furniture was in place. I started with 400 watt Hyundae ACE Neo with standard reflector left behind the model for hair & rim light and another 400 watt softboxed as main light left of the model. They were both powered by my Innovatronix Explorer XT and Triggered via the Yong Nuo RF-602 wireless radio triggers. The background ambient light I exposed for roughly 1 -1.5 stops under to capture more of the cloud and sky details. I roughly metered 1/200sec @ f11, ISO 100 to get this. One of the drawbacks of softbox modifiers is the amount of light lost especially in an outdoor mid-afternoon shoot. Due to its distance from the model I resorted to switching it with a standard reflector just to get enough light into the scene as there was just not enough time to set up additional lighting.
 Overall with time restraints the shoot turned out successful and just had enough time to process, print and dry mount the designers chosen one for inclusion at the Fashion Forward booth.

Update: Post Fashion Forward Festival the images have been revisited and I’ve played and retouched a few which I’ve included in this blog.

Today’s project was shooting Mikayla Ja’s Red Dress competition entry for the Fashion Forward Festival being held on Paddington 7th of May, 2010. We had Biljana Alavanja modelling the gorgeous dress with fashion designer Bojana Zjacic doing the hair & makeup for the shoot. One incomplete feature of the dress not attached during the shoot  is a 2 metre long train containing a mosaic of the red Aids ribbon with images of models and graphics relating to the theme. We did a models against aids shoot the week before with about 15 models and additional graphics were created during the week. We used a freeware program called Andrea Mosaic written by Andrea Denzler to construct the mosaic. The material used for the train is Jacquards 16mm Silk Habotai purchased from Giclee Media Supplies in Victoria and the mosaic printed on it via my Epson 7800.

The shoot location was Mikayla Ja’s newly built & empty garage workshop/studio at fashion designer Mandy Heng’s residence. For a clean look  I decided to use their bare off-white walls as the background instead of a paper roll or fabric background – my white paper background is too short for the dress and fabric backgrounds always have the problem of creases. I wanted to isolate the light from the background to darken it and add more emphasis on the model so used a large 27inch gridded beauty dish on the right. For fill I used a Paul Buffs 86″ silver PLM umbrella on the left. For the hair light I attached a Canon 550EX bare with Yong Nuo RF-602 receiver and mid shoot also added  additional fill using a Canon 580EX and white shoot through umbrella. Majority of post process including skin touch ups and removal of the floor skirting in the background.

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Yesterday we shot a large number of models for a Models against Aids – Designers Campaign project organised by Mandy Heng from Mikayla Ja. The images intention is to be part of a large mosaic which will be printed onto inkjet fabric to form the train part of a dress they will be showcasing and entering into a competition at the Fashion Forward Festival.  Red and White were the theme  colours and we wrapped up the models in these coloured fabrics before photographing them. We had Joanne Candelaria as our only hair and makeup artist on the day and she did an excellent job with the 14 models in the short timeframes we had to prep and shoot each one. Above are only a small selection of the images used for the mosaic.

Also a thank you to all the models

Vanessa Juliet Christ, Elizabeth, Naomi Davis,  Quisa Maria Blackman,  Lauren Winter, Nitsaar,  Jenna  Moss, Jack H, Talia Smith, Margaret Willis, Maggie Curran, Julie Towers, Josie Treuberg,  and MJ Basilo

for your time and effort in getting this project happening.

I purchased the Yong Nuo RF-602 Wireless Trigger over a month ago after hearing and reading rave reviews about it. I decided that I’d wait until I’ve used it in a number of shoots and situations before I’d write my experiences on it. The final need to purchase a remote triggering system came about from two problems. The first being some frustrations with getting my studio strobes to fire reliably during outdoor location shoots. The other reason being able to isolate the strobes firing to my camera only when in a room full of people with cameras and flashes.
Most studio strobes have an optical slave cell built in which causes it to fire every time it detects a flash. In a studio or indoor location light tends to bounce off all around the room from walls, ceilings, to clothes and furnishings. This makes it easy to get almost all the strobes to fire together. I use one of my 580ex or 550ex Speedlites with Stofen diffuser cap pointed up or back and set on manual to the lowest setting as the trigger. This gives me the flexibility to work without sync cords but only works well when there is only one camera with flash being used at the location. If you are in a room where other cameras might be used (especially P&S) then the constant triggering could overload the flash and cause it to blow in a bad smoking fashion.
Now with outdoor location shoots we get the opposite problem – light has a lot less number of surfaces for light to bounce from. I can point a speedlite or use a sync cord to fire one strobe but as that light is most probably pointed to the subject it has a good chance not to trigger most of the other slaves. This was a frustration with some of my first location shoots using studio strobes as repositioning them close enough in a scene to be triggered wasn’t always ideal placements. Sometimes I would go as far as using 5 strobes – anywhere main light, fill light, hair light, and kicker/rim lights to background lights. There was a lot of wasted time and effort trying to get all these to work together and so I did a little research on the latest wireless trigger systems and the Yong Nuo RF-602 stood out for performance and value for money. I purchased a 4 receiver + transmitter kit ($110AU) and 6.35mm sync plugs (approx $7AU) from their online eBay store. Additionally I bought two Elinchom to Inexpensive Radio Slave Adapter cables ($18US each) from FlashZebra.com so I can connect my older pair of Elinchrom classics (approx 15 years old and still kicking hard).

Just more on the RF-602 specs taken from their site

The receiver can be connected to the camera and the transmitter be used as a remote wireless trigger.
Although the transmitter range says 100 meters other have found it to work well over it. I have triggered from around 120meters in open field without any misfires and have read about others getting it working at 150-200meters.
Most of the cheap eBay triggers had a 10-30meter range and were more prone to misfiring from interference. The RF-602 ran on 2.4 GHz and in my household with a small number of devices running at this range I’ve not encountered any interference as of yet. Also as they use radio frequencies they are not limited to line of site or light to trigger and thus will trigger behind a wall or enclosure without problems.
The transmitter itself is light and small and main thing I would like changed on it would be the inclusion of a hot shoe lock. It’s easy to misalign or knock it off the hot shoe completely if you bump it. The receivers just dangle off the coiled cords when attached to the strobes sync outlets. I think using Velcro stickers to attach it to the strobes when in use would extend the life of the cords as well as minimise the chances of anything of it getting loose or disconnected during a shoot.
Overall I’m very happy with the reliability, price and quality of the system. The top end triggers out there are the PocketWizards and although they are great – price wise is a massive difference and I mean massive.

I’ve just acquired the Xerox Phaser 7760DN colour laser printer for a very good price. Normal retail in Australia is in the $12000 range. It’s a high quality production grade printer that allows printing on media up to SRA3 (450mm x 320mm) and 255gsm. It’s main use will be printing all my photo marketing and design material in-house to save costs but I’ll also open up additional discounted printing services for my clients – especially weddings.