Highlight: Photographing the cutest, coolest, chickest baby clothes in the world.
Lowlight: The death of a Garden gazebo.
From the Belle Enfant Collection
Fill in: I got this contact from a friend and it is a departure from my normal work. Working with a company from the start is always exciting and Belle Enfant were full of fresh ideas, visually very aware and their baby clothes were to die for. We had several meetings and trial shoots before our major photoshoot of the collection which was held at my workshop. The clothes needed to be steamed before being shot. It was an sunny but breezy day and I put the steamer outside under a gazebo so the steam did not interfere with shooting in the workshop. As the day wore on, the breeze picked up and the sides of the gazebo started to act like a sail so I took the side flaps off leaving just the canopy. My neighbour gave the gazebo a good hammering into the ground to secure it and the shoot continued. Imagine my surprise when I went out to get the next set of clothes to see the stylist open mouthed staring at the sky with steamer in one hand and cute woolly jumper in the other and stuttering 'It just took off like a rocket!'
'Where's the gazebo?' I gasped and she pointed with the steamer nozzle (still issuing clouds of hot vapour) to beyond the roof of the garage.
I looked over the garage roof but no gazebo was to be seen.
I peered over the garden fence into the sideway but no gazebo was to be seen.
I stood on my son's trampoline to get a good view onto next door's garden beyond the sideway but still no gazebo.
Then looking off further into the distance, I spied the gazebo, spread-eagled like a giant dead spider, turned inside out by the wind and splatted halfway up a particularly robust conifer.
All I can say is Thank God for that tree. With the wind the way it was, who knows where the gazebo may have ended up. The M25 is only up the road and I hate to think what would have happened if it had crash landed in the fast line at Junction 28.
Tech Spec: The golden rule of thirds is known by most photographers but the golden inverse rule of size verses preparation is not so well known, in that the smaller the item to be photographed is, the more time will be spent arranging it and preparing it for photographing. The baby clothes were tiny and getting them to look cute and natural, but tidy at the same time was no mean feat. In the end they had more Photoshop work done on their wrinkles and bumps than an ageing c-list celebrity in Hello. I lit them with the largest soft box I own, with huge reflectors for a vitally shadowless set up and the clothes were hung from a hanger over a white still life cove-table and allowed to 'fall' into a natural shape.
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