In the first part of the coverage on the RoyalBLUSH production, I talked about the shoot and the lighting technique. Now let’s have a look at the post processing and retouching.
We had a very tight schedule to shoot and process with only a few days to get everything printed up for a show at GREENshowroom in Berlin. So I had to find a way to speed up the retouching on the 9 images which the client selected. As you may know a regular retouching process on a fashion image can easily consume a day’s work or more. Clearly we did not have this kind of time here. So I decided to work exclusively in Adobe Lightroom 2 and see what I can achieve using only this single powerful tool. I figured I could still take the shots into Photoshop if things wouldn’t come to a satisfactory result… But let’s start at the beginning!
I always try to think of fashion in new ways. Fashion is, to a large extent, about texture, about contrast and form. Some time ago I came up with the idea of a fashion shoot made of nothing but shreds of paper. The dress, the setting, everything! I did this as a personal project, not with a commercial, but a fine art afterlife in mind.
I approached Jana Keller, designer of RoyalBLUSH to craft a paper dress for me. She was all over it and started sketching right away.
Early on I realized we would need a special model to make this one work. I turned to Option Model in Zürich for suggestions and it soon became clear that a black model would provide the necessary edge for the idea. We cast the talented and lovely Mariatu, who performed admirably!
Before the shoot me and my beloved girlfriend Fräulein Scharlach spent three evenings shredding over 100 square meters of paper and another evening rigging it all up in the studio.
The Lighting setup consisted of a beauty dish on a boom above the set, which served as the main light and was balanced for normal exposure. A strip light, about one stop over, was used as a rim light from the right. As fill I set up a large softobox camera left, dialed down 1 stop. In addition to this I used a gridded spot, about half a stop over, as a little kicker, slightly off camera axis to add some light to Mariatu’s face and torso. (I used Broncolor generators and heads)
Hair & Make Up was done by the incredibly talented Rachel Wolfisberg. She’s always full of fresh ideas and just great to have around!
And this is how it all turned out:
But wait, there’s more! Where there’s paper… someone might get the idea to paint on it! Check out the behind the scenes video for all the technicolor juice… Enjoy!
Today I felt like putting together an online portfolio of my latest fashion work. So how do I go about that? The idea of a slideshow came to mind. I was curious to find out what I could do with slideshows from flickr and see if there’s a better way yet. After all I want this puppy to do a bunch of things for me:
Smooth reliable playback! It just needs to work and look good, or it’ll do no good for me.
Embed code! After all I’ll want this to be posted in as many places as possible.
Linkage! I’d like to link back to my website, when someone clicks on an image or the player.
Updates! I might just want to add images, even though the slideshow is out and playing on various sites.
So I started with my flickr account, created an album, added my latest fashion images and defined the running order. Pretty easy, takes a few minutes. Hit the slideshow button, pick up the embed code and here we go:
Looks pretty good. Even has some navigation. But it only links back to my flickr account and no way to have it link to my site, which I’d much prefer! And sadly there is no embed code to be obtained externally, so no one else can host it on their site, blog, facebook, etc. There’s only a regular link, which won’t launch the slideshow player.
On the plus side however, I can update the album on my flickr account and the changes will filter back to all the places where this is published. Very cool!
Next up was slideroll.com, which also allows you to draw from your flickr account - or upload manually if you don’t have one. It was fairly easy to drag & drop from my previously created flickr album and create the slideshow in a web 2.0 type interface, which includes a timeline to organize the photos in. Here it goes:
Click on the images and it’ll take you to my site - good stuff! But still no external embed code for sharing… And no dynamic updating of the content. Plus the player is pretty small to my taste. However, Slideroll offers a free application to download and convert your existing slideshow into a physical movie. This can then be uploaded to YouTube:
Now the YouTube Version can be picked up and embedded elsewhere by anybody. But quality is poor and again no linkage to my main site. Plus the whole process of creating and then rendering out a movie file to then be uploaded to YouTube is a little cumbersome.
I found a few more slide making applications and services, all of which seem to do the same or less than the few options outlined above. Any of you have a link or idea to share on how to make the perfect online slideshow? Hit me in the comments with your suggestions!!!
