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.

I was out shooting with my good friend Rob and a few others this past weekend in Grays.  Ordinarily our shoots involve buildings, scenery or light painting but today was a bit different.  One of our fellow POTN members had set up a day of shooting with a few lovely models (are there any other kind?) for a Trash the Dress practice shoot.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept and don’t like following links in blogs, it generally involves a wedding dress or equally elegant gown and a setting you wouldn’t normally wear such an outfit in.  In today’s case, we had the sunny Amy and Natasha modeling a couple of eBay wedding dresses out on some estates and a beach in Essex.

The day started off slow as we (the photographers) were all more or less new to this type of shoot and we were tripping ourselves up trying to get different light synching methods to all work together.  In the end, we stuck to my trusty pocket wizard Plus II’s and just shot everything in manual.  After that, it was just a question of trying to figure out where and how to pose the models, which for me is the trickiest part of a shoot like this.  Fortunately, both of the girls had done this before and didn’t need a whole lot of direction.

Setup shot by Rob Bridgens

The main event of the day was to end up down at the beach to shoot a bit of a paint fight in front of the wreck of an old lightship called The Gull.  Rob and I snuck in a few more final shots in the dwindling light while everyone else waited patiently.

The paint fight itself was a bit chaotic; 6 photographers and a videographer all vying for a better vantage point while simultaneously avoiding paint splatter is not conducive to an organized shoot.  It was fun (for the girls especially), but there were lessons to be learned for the next attempt.

In the end, I think everyone walked away with some decent shots and picked up a few new skills or ideas which was what the entire process was about.

Thanks again to Steve for organizing it all.  Also thanks to Razvan for taking the videos of us shooting all day (and for holding light stands as well!).  The first video of our daytime shooting is available here and the second video which covers the paint fight is here.

There are a few more photos in the gallery.  It was hard to pick my favourites to post in the blog this time, so check out the rest!