zarek rahman © 2011
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How I shot it: Fashion shoot for Asian Bride Magazine

So in March I was lucky enough to be asked to shoot a fashion editorial for the latest issue of Asian Bride Magazine which has been on the shelves for a few weeks now. The shoot took place at Theme Traders which is a large warehouse in North London containing loads of different themed sets with associated props and costumes. The brief was to shoot 6 different Asian wedding outfits for a mother and daughter feature. I’ve included some of my favourite shots and a writeup of how they were lit after the break.

It was a pretty hectic day (6 costume and makeup changes in about 7 hours) and I was called in at the last minute so I didn’t really have time to prepare or plan any of the shots before I arrived. As a result I had to come up with the lighting setups on the spot based on what the Editor wanted. The side effect of this was that I totally forgot to take any setup shots, but as a (poor) substitute I’ve drawn up the lighting diagrams for each shot.

For the shot that you see above we wanted to go for an overexposed, daylight shining through a window feel. The problem with that was that the set was deep inside a warehouse and about 2×2 meters in size:

Initial setup and camera settings

Before thinking about putting lights here and there, I considered the equipment that I had at my disposal:

• Ranger Quadra
• 4 speedlights
• Remote triggers
• D700 with 24-70 f2.8, 70-200 f2.8 and 50mm f1.4 G.

Given the size of the space, the only real option was to use the 24-70 and the 50mm, despite the 70-200 being the best of the three lenses for portraits. With that in mind, I started thinking about my surroundings and what sort of settings I would have to use on the camera. You can clearly see that the area was swathed in nasty fluorescent light. In order to totally cut that out of my images I needed to set my camera’s shutter speed to the highest possible while using flash, which is 1/250s. I fired off a few test shots at f5.6 (for adequate depth of field), 1/250s (max sync speed for the camera) and ISO200 (for best dynamic range and noise control). These came out totally black, confirming that I was able to cut out the ambient light.

Shot 1: the daylight effect

In case you don’t feel like scrolling up, here’s the image again:

You may have noticed that particularly ugly net curtain hanging behind the sofa. Well, it turned out to be a blessing because said curtain also doubled up as a gigantic diffuser behind the sofa. I placed my Quadra about 3 meters behind the net and fired it into it, adjusting the power until I got a nice even spread which didn’t overexpose the sofa or the models themselves. I then asked a couple of assistants to hop onto the sofa so I could position the front lighting, which was a gridded beauty dish above and at camera left, coupled with a large white reflector to camera right:

• The beauty dish acts as the main light illuminating the models’ faces and outfits. I used a grid because I like the main light to have a little more direction than the dish without a grid would have given. You can see that this is a slightly harder light, evidenced by the shadows under the models’ noses and arms.
• By firing the Quadra through the net curtain, the giant piece of material acted as a large diffuser which bathes the back of the models and the sofa in a soft white light.
• The reflector takes some of that light and throws it back onto the right side of the sofa and the models’ feet. The light returned by the reflector was not a huge amount, but served the purpose of filling in shadows created by the beauty dish.
• I was shooting white on white, so I had to be careful that their clothes didn’t blend into the backdrop. This was down the power settings on the Quadra. I also had to be careful that I didn’t overexpose the outfits, otherwise detail would have been lost. Nobody wants a fashion photograph where you can’t see the fashion.

Shot 2: on the floor with the fairy lights showing

This one was a little different to the last. For starters, we took away the sofa and placed the models on the floor. I also removed the Quadra and only lit the models from the front; primarily because I wanted to retain some of the fairy lights which were dangling behind the net curtain into the image. In order to do this I had to slow my shutter speed down substantially, to 1/20s. Normally, with such a slow shutter speed the models would need to be very still but when you add flash into the equation they are frozen and the only part of the image you need to worry about being affected by camera shake is the part not illuminated by the flash. To combat this I put the camera on a tripod before I set up the lights:

• I got on the floor to match the models’ lines of sight because shooting from above didn’t look as interesting.
• I zoomed out as far as possible with my lens in order to have as little distortion as possible in the image and also to try and isolate them from the backdrop, which could have been distracting if I had shot at a wider focal length.
• I wanted as much available light as possible in the image so I shot at 1/20s, f4.5, ISO 800.
• Here are a few more with this set up:

Shot 3: a little bit of fun

• This one wasn’t in the brief, but we had a little time after the last few so I positioned the umbrella to camera left, at face level, and the reflector on the other side.
• I feathered the umbrella heavily so I could see the light falloff in the actual image, because I thought it looked cool.
• I guess someone else thought it looked cool too because this shot ended up being used elsewhere in the magazine, full page. Yay!

Shot 4: showing the back

The objective here was to show the back of the daughter’s dress and the front of the mother. In such a tight space this turned out to be a real pain. We dragged a plinth in from one of the other theme sections and used it as a makeshift table on which the mother could rest, with the daughter placing her arms around her to make the back of the dress visible. We threw a few rose petals on there to make it a bit more interesting.

I used the gridded dish to camera right, a gridded spot to camera left and  my Orbis ring flash for some fill:

That’s all for now. You can see a few more of the photos from the shoot in my gallery, here.