Storytelling with Photographs - Alice in Wonderland themed photoshoot with Brittney

My apologies for not having updated this blog in a while.  Work has been keeping me preoccupied and though I have continued doing model photoshoots, I've been falling behind on doing the BTS posts.

I have been keeping notes on each shoot to help me remember details when I finally get around to doing the BTS write-ups, so the posts will eventually get caught up (I hope).  It's just difficult to get back into writing when you haven't done it in a while.

To help me get back into the swing of things, I decided to start with something simple:

For a while now I had been wanting to experiment with photographic storytelling - creating a series of images that put together would tell an entire story. So when model Brittney Baker (one of my favorite models to work with in Maui) contacted me about doing an Alice in Wonderland styled photoshoot I quickly agreed.  After a few days of prep work, we headed up to Olinda to the Waihou Spring Trail one morning for the shoot.

To prep for this shoot, I put together a simple storyline to use as a shooting guide for the different photos that we would need to take to convey the story:

Alice wanders around a forest.  It seems normal at first, but she starts to see things that may or may not be illusions.  She eventually finds a large rabbit hole and peers into it but cannot see where it leads.  She ponders for a moment, then decides to take a leap of faith.

Since we were there early in the morning, the light coming through the trees looked amazing, so we mainly worked with the existing light.  Whenever we needed some fill light, we used a California Sunbounce Pro Silver/White reflector which we had mounted on a C-Stand.

In a couple of instances, we also used the Cheetahstand CL360 as a backlight.

Assembly of the slideshow was done in Final Cut Pro X, using various transitions and some subtle movements of the photos to imply the action of walking through the forest. Music was licensed through SongFreedom.com.

Wandering Alice from MauiPhoto on Vimeo.

Again my apologies for the lack of updates, and the relative brevity of this post.  Lighting-wise there wasn't much to write up about, as it was mostly done with natural light. In a lot of the shots, we didn't even need to use the reflector as the existing light was already awesome.  Plus when you have a fantastic model such as Brittney, you could probably light her with a $2 flashlight and she would look awesome.

Working on more BTS posts.  Stay Tuned....