Studio Fashion and Beauty Lighting – Live Shoot Superdrug

STUDIO FASHION & FASHION BEAUTY LIGHTING – FOR BRAND

The good use of advertising photography can often bring a whole advertising concept together.  These days stock photography has almost taken over in advertising and marketing, but it often portrays a lack of originality usually by an advertising agency but sometimes as a clients budget is not realistic. Poor concepts in photography often weaken or destroy a campaign.

Working for high street brands is great as it’s these types of shoots that earn the big bucks. A lot of fashion work can be people getting together for submission or tests and often look busy. I have been through this process but nowadays keep my eyes on the account and the clients first before indulging in my own shoots. Advertising shoots are also interesting in a way although more constrained and normally based on the subject matter being captured.

What a challenge!.
In this shoot, a normal approach may have been to sit up the models and work this way but early on I realised it would be tricky to get the perfect waves and quality look in the hair because of gravity,  the model’s faces also seemed to elongate and look misshapen for some reason. For a boxed product, this was to be a big problem, therefore, had quite a dilemma on how to get the best angles and lighting, also how we should set the shoot up for almost a weeks shoot and 1000’s of hires images for the client to ponder over.

Finally, I decided it was far better to lay the model down which shocked the clients and the team but this meant the model’s faces would look more relaxed. The success of this method can clearly be seen and is not obvious in the finished images.  An unorthodox way and not a normal way of working, but it helped me to get the basic photography correct, it also helped the hairstylist position the model’s hair and add some fake pieces to elongate and extend the models own.

BEAUTY LIGHTING FOR PRODUCTS

The lighting setup for the shoot was straightforward and can be seen in the image above. I used a couple of 2.5k lighting packs and 4 fan-cooled heads. The light control was with a beauty dish which had a grid in and a sock over the end to be directional and soft. The best light needed for a great retouch

The finished images would need a fair bit of post-production and retouching to get almost a perfect look. I was fortunate that three of the girls had near-perfect skin but the others didn’t. I was closely working with the agency creative director and their team and we worked through their mood boards. Weeks, before we had already met up at the casting and chosen the models we felt, were the most suitable and signed off by the client.

The production team was my own James Nader Productions and we did all of the production including food and drinks for the day. We used a super studio in central Islington called ANGELSPACE not far from The Angel tube stop.

I also managed to create some online videos for the new social media launch of the products and whilst shooting this we captured some images suitable for my book.