Day 8 of 9 West Edmonton Mall bridal fashion spread.

(my shot, which will not make the cut, because it does not work stylistically.. but its nice)

Today we spent the whole day shooting West Edmonton Mall's 2010 bridal fashion spread. The shoot itself took place at WEM and we were supported by their great marketing team.

As many readers of my previous blog posts know I sketch out pretty much every shoot I do. Its a previs technique I learned in Television which is basically storyboarding.

I use sketches as guide line when things arent going so well, or when I want a refresher when shooting for 6hrs or more. If you look at the sketch on the right, you will notice its an awful lot like the photo above. I used the sketch as a starting point, and in the final image, basically evolved the idea to a more "straight up" pose. For this shoot I brought 3 pages with 6 sketches each.

The shoot itself we shot 9 or 10 dresses with 6 different models.

Stylistically we had to shoot it on white or light grey because the women were going to be "cut" out and placed in the layout. This posed a challenge as dresses are white and we wanted the images to be easily cut out, with little or no color casts.

I shot it on the Phase One because I really wanted the highlight details so the designers could have great tonal range making their job easier.

At the end however I did do one shot the way "I wanted" and the lead designer Luke was cool with letting me do it. Its the girl in the red dress (the first image on this post) on the dark grey background. Although this shot rocks (in my opinion) It is completely un-usable in the spread because its too moody and too dark for the concept.

That's the thing a lot of photographers forget, often what they may consider are the best looking photographs are not the ones that can be used in print because of things like layout or conflicting style dictate how you need to shoot.

(stylist from Evelyn Charls touching up hair)
I think that's why it's really important for a photographer to be able to understand different styles and ways of shooting.

Please excuse all the dust specks... these again are clean out of camera with 0 touch ups.

Enjoy!



C