As a Fashion Photographer, it can definitely be hard coming up with new ideas or concepts. When we can’t come up with something interesting, we often just decide not to shoot anything at all. This is a creativity killer!! I was out of ideas a few months ago and decided to push past my hesitance and just rent the coolest house I could find for a 2 day staycation. Before booking it, I called Emily Hall… one of my favorite models to shoot with. She’s fun, easy going, doesn’t mind being a goofball. She also kills it with her posing. She was available. The house was an awesome mid century modern house with a pool and it was a scorcher that weekend. I had her bring a bunch of her own vintage gear and brought some pieces I already owned from prior shoots. I also made a stop at the market to buy drinks and fruit which I planned on using in some of our photos.
Day1, I just stayed at the house, hung out and got a feel for the home. I figured out where which areas I liked and the times it would be best to photograph in those spots. I may or may not have dipped in the pool at some point to further enjoy the creative process :)
Day 2, Emily showed up around 1pm and we decided on some looks and ideas.
Now, as a fashion photographer, I am used to using flash quite a bit and I am also used to having an assistant to make my workflow go faster… but on this day, it was just me and Ems. I set up for our first shot in the living room since the sun was still pretty high above. I set up my flash and quickly realized that using a flash would make the image unauthentic to the time period, and that it would eat into our shooting time. Quickly made the executive decision that we would go old school with just a camera and nothing else…
This took me out of my comfort zone of being able to control all the details in our shoot, but opened up the freedom of just stating focused on the composition, mood and connection to the reality of our surroundings. Here is one of the shots from our first set up: