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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.

Here’s a behind the scenes video from a recent fashion ad campaign I did for the brand Twist.  We shot with Kendall Kardashian, little sister of Kim Kardashian.  I think this was one of her very first photo shoots, and cameras from Keeping up with the Kardashian’s were there to document the occasion. Kendall was a sweetheart, an enthusiastic model and a joy to work with.  I’m sure she’ll have a nice career in the industry. Her mom was at the shoot, and even her sister Kim stopped by to cheer Kendall on. I’ve never actually watched the Kardashian show, so I didn’t have a preconceived notion of the family. I just found them all to be very nice, supportive, and a pleasure to have on set.

Kendall Kardashian in a fashion photo shoot for Twist. from Christopher Kilkus on Vimeo.

This is the behind the scenes video that goes along with the Sneak Peek of the Heritage 1981 fashion campaign shot at PoohBah’s record store.

Heritage 1981 fashion shoot from Christopher Kilkus on Vimeo.

As you know, I’ve been playing around with video lately, testing out some different cameras and equipment.  Here is a recent test I did with the model Helene Traasavik from Vision Models using the Canon 5D and a camera mounted light.  This is a very rough draft….. I just did a quick edit of the footage in iMovie!  I can’t wait to have a good editor take a crack at it in Final Cut.

Helene at the SLS hotel from Christopher Kilkus on Vimeo.