Here is a campaign we did for Forever 21 in the studio.  They asked for a different lighting look than we normally do to set this campaign apart slightly.  We settled on this backlit lighting scheme that gives us a really bright high key look overall, with lot’s of softness from the flared lights.  It’s actually a really simple set up, we pour tons of light onto our white background, and then only use reflection to bounce all that light back onto our model.  Then it’s just a matter of balancing the bright back lights with the right amount of reflection to dial in the look.  I’ve used this lighting for fashion editorial, where the pictures are more about mood than about clothes….. in that case we really let the backlights flare so they wash out a lot of detail on our subject…. it gives it a wonderfully soft and ethereal glow.  But since this was a retail fashion campaign I didn’t want to wash those details out……  the creatives would have loved the look, but the CEO might question how they are selling clothes when you can’t see any!  The trick with fashion advertising is to find that balance.

Here is our latest fashion video from the Urban Planet campaign shoot a few weeks ago in Brooklyn, New York.

Urban Planet is a cool fashion retailer from Canada and this season they were going for a bit of a grunge style.  It’s always fun for me to shoot with these guys because it’s a different style than I normally do, a bit moodier and more dramatic.

I worked with the wonderful Urban Planet art director Ian Mclleland, and production was kept smooth and trouble free by Christine Kelly, and our stylist Kelly Brown put great outfits together and was a joy as always.

I wasn’t going to have the time or the budget to bring my full crew and equipment package from Los Angeles, so Jacob at CSI Rentals put together everything for me from scratch.  I was a bit nervous about working with assistants provided by a rental house, but they turned out to be the most professional and hard working group of guys I have ever come across!  Thanks Tom Judge, Mark Glenn, Justin Conly, and David Chow!

To make things easier on myself I rented the Digital, Lighting and Grip Van package from CSI….. basically a vehicle that is full of all the equipment you would ever need on a location photo shoot.  This service is common place in Los Angeles, we use them all the time, but as far as I know CSI is one of the only companies that provides this in New York.  I have to say, it was a pleasure not to have to travel through the airport with my usual six giant Pelican cases of equipment!

We shot the video at the same time as the still photoshoot, which is always a massive challenge.  We don’t want to slow the still shoot down because we still need to get about 20 or so shots done in a day, but at the same time we want to do MORE than just a simple behind the scenes video.  It’s just a matter of dividing our forces.  My cameraman is Christian Stoehr who has a lot of experience shooting television and feature films, so he has a good eye and is used to the run and gun style of shooting this requires.

We go into the shoot with an idea of a story we want to tell on video, map out some shots, and I give as much direction as I can. During the shoot, whenever I have time I’ll stay with him and direct the scenes, but since I’m still responsible for getting the still shoot done, I often have to leave him to his own devices.  For this shoot I made sure he also had a camera assistant since we were at a pretty rough location on one of the hottest days of the year in New York.  And the assistant really earned his money that day, there was a point when he almost passed out from the heat!

We shot this on the Canon 5D equipment, and for this one we only had a tripod and a RedRock shoulder rig….. we didn’t have the room to bring the steadycam and slider from L.A.  One thing we have learned with the Canon 5D is that you have to load a cinematic Picture Profile when shooting video….. it mimics shooting on color negative film, sort of flattens out the color, exposure and contrast.  This gives us much more leeway in our color and exposure adjustments in post, and lends the final product a more cinematic feel.

This is also the first video that I have edited completely on my own.  I fought learning Final Cut Pro…. I didn’t want yet another super intensive piece of software in my brain…. it must be getting completely filled up in there by now!  But I’ve realized unless I really knew software and workflow, I was never gonna get the results I wanted.  Filmmaking is a much more collaborative process than photography, but everyone still needs to have a background in everyone else’s job to be able to communicate effectively.  So now that I understand Final Cut and the editing process, I feel like I’m going to be a lot better at working with professional editors on my future videos.

So hope you enjoy the video, and below are a few of the still photos I pulled off the Urban Planet website.  I’ll get around to editing this shoot and retouching these for my portfolio soon.

Here are a few photos from a studio swim shoot we did for Forever 21. I love this light, so crisp, vibrant and simple….. it makes the models and the clothes really pop! There is no secret to it, it’s just a single light pointed directly at the models. It won’t work in all situations but it was perfect for this kind of shoot.

Here is a recent swimwear look book we shot in studio for Forever 21.  Also below you can see the image we delivered to Forever 21 with the orange cutout props provided by the client, and how the graphic designers changed them in post.

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…..

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!

My friend, Christian Stoehr, is in the film and TV biz. Yesterday they were testing a small remote controlled helicopter designed specifically for aerial shots with a RED camera. Cool!