These are some images from a last minute shoot for the Mandy Heng 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 Mandy Heng’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.
Fabulous!
The Innovatronix Explorers are now available in Australia here : http://imagemelbourne.com.au/store//catalog/index.php?cPath=68