Shewls is a natural light photographer and I met her at a shoot for a bikini company called Tiny Triangles. At that shoot I was impressed by the way she directed and communicated with the models in such an infectiously enthusiastic way. When I meet someone that is as excited by photography as me, I know we’re going to get along. So we made plans to shoot together. She stepped up to be the first one in front of the camera. We both like classical Greek sculpture and in particular the way sculptors were able to capture the rich texture of fabric in marble. So we used that as loose inspiration for this shoot. We didn’t have a firm plan, we were just going into the studio to play. (One of my favorite things to do!)
She brought in a white dress and we used it for the first set along with one of the head pieces she brought. We used grided light and feathered light and let one side of her fall into black (chiaroscuro). We added a bounce reflector and then a kicker or rim light on camera right. If you’re a photographer, try to figure out the lighting for each image. I just used the jpg’s out of the camera and the edits are fast and messy, so you’ll see strings hanging off her straps which I didn’t clean up in post.
For the second set we played with fabric. I’ve used fabric quite a lot, but not often as clothing. So it was a bit of a challenge to create something wearable with a single piece. The Greeks and Romans did it and Shewls can wrap a sari, so I was sure we could figure out something. The lighting was relatively straight forward for this set. The goal was to simply play with accentuating the folds with shadow.