One day I’ve got a call from one of my clients, she asked for something bright and sunny. It didn`t seem to fit anything I used in my portfolio so far. But we all have commercial projects, that’s why I wanted to share this special experience with you.

My main idea was to use a minimal equipment case to make the shoot on location more relocatable and simple, but with different kinds of shots. This designer’s clothes cannot be framed in only one style, as there were a lot of different dresses – casual and luxury. So I decided to diversify them.

All these light set-ups were mixed with natural sunlight, so living in grey and hazy Moscow forced us to wait for the swift-passing sun for quite a while.

The first story was my favorite one! Flying girly dresses and airy atmosphere.

We decided to shoot this story opposite to the sun – to show the transparency of the dresses. As you can see in the second picture, I used crazy flairs (thanks to my 24-105 lens) to create a soft and dreamy mood.

I just added one uncovered MobiLED (with no reflector) and lighted up the faces to get a sharp image and show more details of the dresses. With no filling light, this position of the sun normally gives us hazy dark silhouettes.

When we walked through the park where we planned to shoot, we met trees of rowan berries. That was a great place to shoot bright clothes, like this striped costume. Orange berries create a good combination with some of the outfits. In this series, my models look like some kind of aliens, realistic ethereal, but a little bit strange. Not as naturally as we are used to seeing each other in real life.

In general, after retouching these photos they appear like an illustration from retro-futuristic tales. Why not? So “Among us” became the title for this series.

As a key light I used the sun and added a little bit of filling light with the standard silver umbrella.

The same scheme was used for all of these images. We just changed the location and the outfits to create an even more luxurious story. The key element on these photos is the sky and the camera angle. The sky always gives an atmospheric sense, infinity space which is really hard to create in the studio.

Therefore, the first test shot contained only girls and sunlight from the left side. After that, I turned on the generator and selected the power that is filling shadows fully with no black areas, but the sun does not recover the main source of light.

My aperture was about f/8- f/11 (because I don’t like bokeh), but if you like a soft blurry background, just add a neutral grey filter and open an aperture 🙂

Credits:
Lookbook Marinnet
Photographer Ilona D. Veresk @ilonaveresk
Stylist Alena Grishak @alenagrishak
Makeup/hair Polina Nagornykh @polza_mua, Dasha Bloom @dasha.bloom
Models Olga Sytenko @olg_sy & Daria Bogatiuk @daria_bogatyuk