Here are a few others from concept #2 that did not make the final shortlist
As you may know concept #2 was my favourite but the overall look hints too much summer tones so at the time the client wasn't to fond of it. I did a few shots of Amber sleeping on the ground to illustrate the dreamy concept where at the start of the catalogue i planned to have a dreamy pic like amber dreaming of a winter wonderland on a summers day and then the catalogue would transition into the winter infra red images, but it didn't work because amber's dress was a winter dress. In order to salvage some of these shots i offered to etch them and composite the white Infra red backgrounds but that would have taken a lot of time which which i didn't have in abundance, so eventually we just went towards concept #3 - studio shots, etch and infra red backgrounds and scraped concept#2
Amber(older one) and Kia here in two of the most popular dresses, which i think are very aesthetic looking, art direction: surreal, sophisticated and dreamy with a hint of playfullness
note i did make mistakes:
image #2 on the left overexposed at this stage still trying to work out optimal exposure with some art directed adjustments, image was overexposed
image #2 on the right, pose not right as amber wasn't co-operating at that moment but i shot it becuase the light setup and exposure was perfect just the way i wanted it, i later used that image for lighting setup and expsoure reference for the rest of the shoot
bit of story behind image #5
is a composited image 2 shots merged into 1. I shot from a static camera position with a tripod at 24mm so the persepective would be the same across all shots, i had to tell kia to stand in a certain area of the scene to ge tthe end image i wanted, kids are hard to control so after many tries, i got 2 good ones, 2nd problem was when kia was far away from me i had to extend the range and move the portable strobe light to follow her so i would get even lighting, later in photoshop i would clone out the location light in the scene, this process would of been too much work for the 28 shots needed to fill the catalog so i scraped it, also even lighting is hard to maintain in that sort of scene.
image #7 perfect example of why you rent a $50,000 strobe light with a generator instead of a batterypack, the one i rented had a recycle time of 3 seconds per burst, i had to get the kids to repeat certain poses because i woudl either miss the shot or the strobe light was recycling, in image 5 pose during movement looked great but the strobe lgiht refused to fire because a second beofre that i took a shot. There is some light coming from the SB800 from the right which Onyx was holding.
image #10 also shows strobe light not firing but the sb800 did from the right, the pose and the wind caught the hair and it was a great moment to capture.
samarwit in pose, she was a natural very little pose directing from me was required, top 2 got selected for the brochure as is no infra red backgrounds, kia(blonde) in a great pose showing movement and showin g the fashion well, but client thought it look to boyish for some reason and it got cut out from final selection but i liked it.
final 3 in a sequence also got shortlisted as a cohesive set, the client wanted a seroius pose with Samarwit wearing hte glases but that didn't work on camera so i told her to put out some spunky funk, sometimes you have to do the poses yourself so the model can mimic you, which is much more effective than trying to describe what you want verbally, it also happens to breaks the ice between model and photographer because when the photographger poses they normally look silly, people laugh, kids find it entertaining.
because of time constraints i did not offer to do the final graphic design and layout of the catalogue, but 7 years of graphic design experience warranted my 2cents on the final layout, i put forward this layout to the client
A4 format, 1 page sequence shots to show progression and storytelling, then on the right main feature image, client liked it but in the end went for nearly square cropped images 1 on a page designed by another designer. Next time i will get full control as the designer can really destroy an image when re-cropped as i already famed my images right considering composition. The black outer border is just to differentiate extents of the white catalogue page
Excellent!
