The Photoshoot

Contact Sheets

I used a Nikon d800, so I had tons of resolution to play with, to crop and get in depth in Photoshop if I needed to. I used an 85mm lens as this was the longest telephoto lens that I could use in the studio while still retaining a whole body photo. I like to use telephoto lenses as they pull things close together and compress the image so peoples faces look natural. I also used a 24-70mm lens, partially for its versatility, mainly so I could shoot on 24mm and get weird wide effects on each photograph where things are pushed even further away from the lens than seems natural. I thought this effect worked well as the garments and the concepts behind them are insects. 

I primarily used a large softbox to light each photograph. The soft box was above the model. We used a grey background to fit with the dark nature of the photographs. I also changed to a white backdrop to make the colourful vibrant orange top to really stand up out of the screen. Beneath the models feet out of shot i had a large white board to reflect some light back into the model to further soften shadows, I did this because shooting on a dark background naturally lends itself to very dark contrasty images and I wanted to break away from this a little. I also tried using a Ring Flash. This created a nice effect for the photographs with longer exposures of 1-3 seconds. This forced me to have the camera in a stable spot and also lit the photograph across the frame more, you can notice lots of light fall off on the photographs shot with the large softbox.