After last years successful trash the dress shoot we knew we wanted to have another crack at it.  Steve did his usual thing of buying used wedding dresses off of ebay and then soliciting models through model mayham.  What started off as 10 willing girls quickly dwindled down to 3 and we were blessed the lovely Shez, Chelsea and Alice.

The day started off as most of our photo shoots do.  A little behind on the time schedule and a little bewildered about where we were supposed to be.  We quickly found our bearings and made our way to an odd little area of Hounslow Heath that was part of a disused rail line.  Lots of curved, 6 foot retaining walls covered in graffiti making up a line of semi-circles.  I can only assume these were used for turning rail cars?  Very odd.

The plan for the day was to get warmed up doing a few standard shots of the girls in their respective wedding dresses before we broke out the paints and destroyed said dresses.  The models were great and very easy to work with, which is always a bonus as most of us there don’t have much experience in directing people how to pose.

The best bit of the day for me though was the 2 local kids who happened to be rummaging around looking for ‘not quite empty’ tins of spray paint so they could practice their tagging.  We drafted them in to spray the models with paint instead of wasting it covering up decent graffiti with their names and mostly illegible phallic drawings.  As a bonus, one had a hoodie on and we had a spare handy for the other so we could complete the asbo-tot image.

After the kids were called away by a slightly angry mom on a phone, we carried on with the planned paint fight.  I’ve got a few images that have yet to be processed of the paint fight, but like last time it was fairly chaotic and I generally wasn’t happy with the results.

Overall though, it was a brilliant day and we all walked away with some great images.  Thanks to Rich, Rob and Steve (don’t know your website Steve) for all of the ideas and help with the shots.  Always great working with you guys.  Oh, and I’m very happy I broke my ‘no new gear this year’ and picked up a 125cm softbox and tri-flash adapter.  Soooo worth it!

More photos in the gallery and a few more to come over the next week or two.

So I got a text from Neal this past Wednesday asking if I was up for heading back down to the Banksy Tunnel for a car/promo shoot with some friends of his.  The plan as I understood it was to photograph a couple of cars along with a few models and just have a bit of fun with it.

Given I’m less than 2 months into my 365 project and already running out of ideas I jumped at the chance.  It’s been a while since I’ve worked with models and I’ve never shot cars properly before so it sounds like a fun evening.

While I won’t say it wasn’t fun, it was quite a bit more work than I’d anticipated.  I was expecting 1 or 2 models and 2 or 3 cars, but we ended up with 5 girls and 10-12 cars of which we probably only 6 or 7.  Neal and I managed an almost assembly line style production of taking around 20 shots of each car with and without the girls, but there was little time to get the lighting down.  I used some ‘safe’ settings and we fired away but looking back I’m wishing for a hair light in a few of them.  Live and learn I guess.

Overall it was a good night.  Met some friendly people and walked away with some fun photos for the day, which is always better than yet another shot of my cat.

Thanks again to the folks at South East Customz for providing the cars and the promo girls, as well as helping to organize the shoot itself.  I don’t think we would have managed the number of shots we did without those guys lining up the cars so we could do one after another without much hassle.

There are a few more shots in the gallery.