W23 Blog # 2 w/ Abdul Kassamali

For my lighting final last quarter, I knew I wanted to push myself to reach out to a modeling agency and begin working with other collaborators I’ve never met before, in a professional capacity. I planned the hell out of it, creating a mood board and creative brief, sharing my plans with my instructors for advice, scheduling a lighting test with stand-ins to prepare for the shoot and pulled money from my personal savings to make sure we had the right make-up, hairspray and other necessities for this shoot. The agreement I struck with the chosen model, was that I’d shoot these photos for my assignment, and also two other looks of her choice.

Above are four key pages in my completed creative brief after nailing down a model, the setting and lighting plans, and performing a lighting test using my classmate Ethan as a stand-in. Ethan later agreed to be a PA on this shoot, luckily for me, since he had already seen the set up process and was familiar with what we would be doing.

We had 4 hours during our shoot to get everything we needed. Due to unfortunate circumstances outside of our control, the model wound up coming in about 45 minutes late. We attempted to get through her first two fashion looks with the thought that those photos wouldn’t take as long as the assignment photos, though for this shoot I kind of wish I would’ve been a little more selfish in this regard, because by the end of this shoot, my crew had gone home and I was too tired be my best creative self. The next set of issues we had, was that in an attempt to save time, I shot photos of Esther’s fashion looks on the same hunter-green seamless I wanted to use for my project, and used an Amran light attached to a soft box too small to avoid having too much fall off for any full-body photos. The end results made a lot more work for myself in the editing/ retouching process.

I feel I have a lot to be proud about in these final images I made for my Fall final in Matt’s Lighting class, I traversed a lot of new territory, and had a massively important learning experience working with a new model who challenged my directing skills in the best way.

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