Mango Fall/ winter 2010/2011

T Mango Fall/ Winter 2011.

Some of the prep work that was required for the shoot. 

*Order the back drop paper from Salam Stores in Wafi City, in Dubai.

http://www.salams.com/pages.php?p=photography&m=1
They have a huge selection of Hama Proline papers the cost per roll is 395.00 UAE or 40 Bd. on each roll there is approximately 20 feet of paper. 

*For this shoot we had a visit to mango picked up our color tones that would work with our red theme, had them steamed and then hung them on a coat rack to keep them from wrinkling. 
*Miranda had gone to the hair salon a couple days before to get a splash of red put in her hair. This was important to keep with the strong red colors.  Her hair was done by Elsa she is the color specialist at Elie and Jean.

The Model in this shoot is Miranda Kent, she is 17 years old with a lot of Modeling talent. She works very well with the camera, has many poses and creative ideas, a couple reasons I wanted to work with her is her porcelain skin and massive volumes of red hair.
 As well as her being my daughter, it is great being able to work together. 

The Make up was done with Simone Gannon. A make up artists that specializes in photography and video make up. A wonderful young creative young artist, who dreams of make up application and funny enough another Irish girl.

(My parents are from Ireland,   
               so I consider myself a little Irish.) 

For this shoot we wanted to do a couple casual outfits as well as some evening styles to show the range that Mango had in for the winter seasons. 

For this shoot, I used my Profoto D1 light with a alien bees beauty dish, that I had  from an old set of lights, I  brought it to a metal shop in town here, and had it modified to make it fit the speed ring for my Profoto's. 

I didn't want the light to  spill on to the back ground  so  I kept the light quite close to the model . The model was roughly 6 feet away from the back drop. My light was placed to my right most of the time, with the height a foot above the model. 

Which in my studio, is a little tight. 

                                                                               

I shot this whole shoot with a  50 mm  1.4 lens. As it was brand new and I really wanted to see how it worked for fashion. A very nice little lens. That I would highly recommend if you like to take portraits of people. Very little distortion, it really sees your subject much like your eyes do! 

The aperture was f5.6 at 1/200th of a second.

The camera I used for this shoot was a Nikon D3,  

When I did my test shoot the colors didn't pop very much so I went into the program controls on my camera and boosted the color saturation more to the reds, I also went up one setting on my sharpening and contrast. 

This made the images pop and give me the correct color tones that I had imagined. 

If you would like to try adjusting your color settings in camera it is really easy to do!  Go to the shooting menu,

Then scroll down till you see Set Picture Control, if you then scroll to the right you have options for standard, neutral vivid, monochrome, scroll tot he right again and you have many options to try. 

this is a little secret that a lot of people don't know about with the Nikon cameras. 

I think I might try and do a video so I can show you how it all works,  that will be another days project. When I get that sorted I will add a link to this blog.  

There is also a setting in your white balance that works quite similar to the Picture control, if you scroll to the right of any option in your white balance you can tweak your colors. There is a full color spectrum that you can play with. Another great option on a lot of the Nikon cameras. 
Sorry I don't know much about the Cannon cameras. I am sure there is a similar option!

On the day of the shoot, John and Elsa came to the studio to work on Miranda's hair, that is always great to have the hair stylist and make up artists involved at the shoot.  

Once I loaded them into lightroom the post processing was rather minimum as the skin and hair were perfect. I cleaned a couple lens spots off the back ground flipped a couple of the photos so they went in a good lay out, other than that, the images were ready to go. 


I would like to Thank Simone for her talents on Miranda's face as she truly looks amazing, Elsa and John for looking after Miranda's hair, before and during the shoot, it is great to have you there to make sure everything is just perfect. Thanks to Mango for everything. Without you this would not have happened. 
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