Heritage 1981 Fashion Film from Christopher Kilkus on Vimeo.

Here is a little film we shot recently for Heritage 1981.   More and more, our fashion clients are getting into shooting short films to go along with their still campaigns.  It’s a challenge to get a still campaign and a short film out of a one day shoot, but right now it seems like the industry is heading in this direction.  For us, it’s a fun new creative avenue to pursue, so we are happy to go along for the ride.  And I have a feeling that clients will soon realize how much value the films have for their brands so they will be willing to spend a little more time on them.  I can’t wait!

We haven’t posted on here for a while…. it’s been crazy busy!!  In just the last two and a half weeks we have had 11 different jobs, both still and film shoots!  That kind of pace really wears on me and my crew, so we have to blow off steam somehow….. and here is the evidence… some funny behind the scenes pictures.  My poor assistants always have to stand in for light tests before we get the models on set, but they always make the most of it.

It’s always fun to see your work blown up to a really large format, so it was great to catch this billboard along the freeway in Los Angeles with one of my images.

I’ve been asked a few times if we have to use an especially high megapixel camera to shoot for billboards.  It may seem like you would need a huge file to enlarge to billboard size, but that’s not the case as the Dots Per Inch of a billboard is actually pretty low.  I currently shoot most of my work on the Canon 1DS MarkIII or the 5D MarkII, and those files enlarge to billboard size without any problem.  Occasionally I’ll use a high megapixel digital back for jobs, but that is more of an aesthetic choice, for instance if I want especially sharp files.  This can be helpful if we anticipate a lot of compositing of images in post and want to be able to zoom deep into an image.  But the Canon camera works great for 99% of our jobs. It’s quick, easy to handle and really rugged, which is more important to us than having tons of megapixels.  Frankly, I think camera manufacturers are far too obsessed with making cameras with higher and higher megapixels, when they really should focus on creating cleaner files, more useful features, and better workflows off the camera.  There are a lot of features on my wish list for the “perfect” camera, but I have a feeling I’ll be waiting a long time for that…..

Every retailer and advertiser is gearing up for Valentine’s Day, which means we have been doing a lot of Valentine’s themed shoots lately.  Being on this end of the marketing campaigns takes a little of the romance out of it!

Here is a nice, simple idea we did for Forever 21.  One light. a pink background, and some creative use of scissors.

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I was at the Cerritos Mall today and stopped by Forever 21’s massive new store.  You may have heard they bought many of the old Mervyn’s department stores, and this is one of the first to make the complete transformation.  The space is huge and really well designed, it’s very impressive!  They must be doing something right because it was packed with customers too.

It was a lot of fun to see all my pictures on the walls, it was practically a gallery show of my work!  Here are a few iPhone snaps to show you guys.

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Here is a story I shot for the Prom issue of Teen Magazine.  With this client, I just give them all the raw images from the shoot, and their art director makes selections and sends it out to their own retouchers. I don’t usually see how the story is going to turn out until I get the magazine.  So I made selects for my own use, and we happened to finish our retouching the same day we got the magazine in the mail.  It was interesting to see the difference in the clients image selection and retouching versus my own, so I thought I would share both here.  You can see it’s pretty similar, which shows the magazine and I really saw eye to eye on the the shoot.  The main difference is that I gave it a bit of a “old” color effect in post.

I wanted to give you guys some background on the technical aspects of being a fashion photographer.  I’ll start with a little about retouching, but please write in and let me know anything else that would interest you.

We do most of our own retouching, I’ve got a great in house team, and I have a lengthy background with Photoshop myself.  (I learned on Photoshop 2.0……. I don’t even want to think about how long ago that was!)

My style tends to lean towards a refined but naturalistic look, often with a bit of a retro vibe.  This makes it easier on us in the retouching stages. We treat every image differently depending on the final look we want and how the image was shot, but generally we  just need to clean the skin up a bit, work the color and exposure, and then add any effects and final sharpen.  (If you want to see someone who does A LOT of work in the retouching stage, check out Dave Hill.  His work is amazing, and his Photoshop skills are beyond belief! )

We have a nice workflow and generally retouch around 200 to 300 images per month for various clients.  We shoot everything in RAW format and process via Adobe RAW into TIFF format.  If the image is for web use only we will then reduce the size of the image to 1200 pixels high before beginning any retouching.  This saves a huge amount of time, as there is much less detail we need to deal with.  The downside is that if in the future we need that same image for print use, we will have to retouch it all over again in high resolution.

Another thing that saves us time is really taking advantage of the Actions function of Photoshop.  There are certain things we do to every single image, and this can easily be automated by building an action.  Even if you are not doing the kind of volume we do in my studio, using Actions will still save you a lot of time.  And who wants to sit in front of a computer any longer than necessary!

I don’t think I need to go into great detail about every technique we use since most of it is pretty obvious and there is all sorts of information on the web about how to do it. For skin we use a combination of a “blending” layer and a “blurring” layer.  We always add a hue/saturation layer set to softlight, which is a great way to adjust contrast and exposure.  We get a lot of our color effects with “gradient map” and “solid color” layers set at different types of blending.  And sometimes we will use various techniques to add film grain, or textures like scratches and dust.

If you want to be a fashion photographer today, you had better be skilled with Photoshop.  It’s become an extremely important part of the process and many photographers have built their careers on the style they create in retouching.    Even if you are going to send all your work out to a retoucher, you still need to have a background in Photoshop to communicate your vision.  I even recommend that make-up artists, hair stylists, fashion stylists, and even models get at least some background in Photoshop.  It just gives you so much more control over your work.  If a photographer is too busy to retouch images for you, wouldn’t it be nice to have the skill to take the raw file and fix it up yourself?

Check out the before and after images below from a few different jobs.  You can see the “after” images are not all that far away from the “before”.  Having started my photography career before digital, I learned to make a clean photograph in camera.  After all, when I was shooting on a 6×7 medium format camera with transparency film I had to make sure I made a perfect image in camera…. even being off a 1/4 stop in exposure or having a slight color cast could sink a job!

Here are some images from an ad campaign I shot for Forever21.  These ended up on billboards around the country, including one printed about 40 feet tall in Times Square.