House for an Art Lover: Portfolio Bridal Shoot

So here's the thing. Since I left college a couple of years ago, I still enjoy creating portfolio shoots. Some people call them "styled" shoots, but I prefer to call them portfolio shoots, as I feel it describes the end result and purpose a lot better.

Anyway. Back in July, I met with another young photographer, on a sunny day in Stirling, called Zoe Campbell. We sat, we chatted (a lot), and she was among the first sort of photographer who I'd met who wasn't simply sizing me up as competition; she was genuinely interested in chatting to me as a fellow photographer and business woman and we got on like the proverbial house on fire. We got to chatting about doing a portfolio shoot together and as I went to leave, I suggested the idea of getting a couple of models, a few frocks, and just going out somewhere and doing a "little shoot". Simple enough, great for practice.

Fast forward a few months and Zoe and I were chatting about it on Twitter. We caught the attention of a few other wedding suppliers, and in the space of an evening online, we'd formed our team: a make up artist - Sophie Edwards; a jewellery and accessory designer - Gioia Mia; a bridal dress designer - Flossy and Dossy; a stationer - Hill Weddings; and a florist - I Heart Flowers. So that was where it began. As we went along, we also recruited the lovely Mack Photography, which was thrilling, into our online team.  We'd also scooped Photos by Zoe into our little gang of chatterboxes, she was unable to join us on the day, but she became an honourary member of our team.

It was a massive shoot, and it involved a lot of organisation and planning. We even had our own private Facebook group, which made things a lot easier. We had proper group meetings in cafes - not just a case of sitting drinking coffee and occasionally commenting "so what about this shoot then?", but actual, sit down, plan it out, and bring your notebook (unless you're me and forgot. Ahem).

There was a lot of cross-planning too. We had diaries to think of, as well as Gioia Mia, Flossy and Dossy, Hill Weddings and I Heart Flowers coordinating on colour, design and materials, both face to face, and via email and online.

We also had to find a venue. Although we wanted it to be predominantly outdoors, we knew we couldn't rely on the Scottish weather as autumn and winter started to pull in, so needed somewhere that had it all - outdoors if it was nice; but a venue that was also willing to let us shoot indoors too.

Finding a venue was perhaps the hardest part. Aside from letting us shoot indoors, I was also keen that they understood this wasn't going to be the sort of thing that could be done in half-an-hour.

That's where House for an Art Lover came in. Located in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, I'd been there previously for a college project shoot and found them to be very friendly and accommodating.  So we called them up, and again they were brilliant. They fitted the plan perfectly - they suited our themes; they were handy and easy for the whole team to access; and they understood what we were trying to do. Without the right venue, the shoot wouldn't have happened at all, so I'm thoroughly grateful to House for An Art Lover for what they did for us.

While visiting a local wedding fair, Sonia from Gioia Mia and I also met a very lovely man who was representing his company at the fair, A Suit That Fits. Aside from being completely charming, we also fell in love with their suit designs. We loved the quirkiness of the suits, the idea that a wedding suit doesn't have to be staid and dull, but can be thoroughly stylish and actually, damned cool. We were thrilled when they agreed to work with us, and sent us some samples for our male models for our shoot.

We also decided to invite Chris from Nuvo Limousines to join our troop. Chris kindly brought his stylish Beauford car to the shoot, which gave us a wonderful starting point for our story. London Ross, from Macs Glasgow gave our models fantastic hairstyles for the shoot. Butler and Taylor were also kind enough to lend us their gorgeous gramophone and some records, to help set our scene.

Of course, no shoot can really take place without models, in this case, Emily Morton and Jamie Hillen who were our 50's couple, while Caeley Elcock and Omar Zingaro Bhatia became our 30s couple. I don't think we can thank them enough, for turning up on a cold, rainy November day, for early morning hair and make up, and then working through the day for us.

My day, started at around 5am. Up early and a good breakfast, packing the car, checking, rechecking, and triple checking I had everything I needed. Then I headed off to collect the gramophone and Sonia, before heading off to see dresses, suits, flowers, models and the rest of the team.

I always wake up early on shoot days. It was a proper November day as well, pouring with rain, grey and dull. I'd hoped that we might be able to shoot outside, but the weather prevented us from venturing out. It felt a world away from sitting outside a cafe in Stirling, sipping coffee with Zoe. Perhaps our biggest battle was chasing the fading light later in the afternoon and having to compensate for a lack of natural daylight pouring in.

We worked hard, all day. House for an Art Lover were incredible, and brilliantly accommodating.

Doing a shoot like this, really is about two halves. The first stage, the planning and preparation, the front end work belonged to Flossy and Dossy, I Heart Flowers, and Gioia Mia. At this stage, the rest of us could only really assist, through organisation; but the work of creating dresses and jewellery, with a deadline approaching, was entirely the domain of our styling team. Due to the fragile nature of flowers, Sophie from I Heart Flowers also had quite a challenge - creating gorgeous bouquets and buttonholes, but having only a small window of opportunity to do so in order to preserve the flowers at their best.  On the day, we all had roles to play - with our make up artist Sophie Edwards and our hair stylist London Ross getting the early morning shift.

Then the workload shifted onto the photographic team. We took photos, bounced around, and then had the work of downloading and editing images, which is always much more time consuming than even sometimes we like to think. It's not the sort of thing you can feasibly do in one sitting either - I always like to download, have an initial look, then spend a little time away from the computer - perhaps an hour or so - in between stages. I need to look, revisit, look again. Sometimes my favourite photo falls to the bottom of the pile; sometimes a photo that didn't initially grab my attention rises to the top of my favourites. I download, then I cull a first time, I do initial tweaks and cull a second time, then I do a thorough edit, and I'll often cull a third time afterwards; occasionally even a forth time, if I feel I'm including too many photographs which are almost identical.

We'd decided early on, before we'd started the shoot, to send the photos to Love my Dress blog. We didn't know if Annabel would blog them, but we thought it would be worth a try. We spent a while editing the photos, then as a group we shortlisted our first selection of our favourite photographs - a portfolio if you like, to showcase to Annabel. It was a careful process. We eliminated duplicates, and ensured that the first taster really was a selection of photographs we felt were our strongest work and most reflective of our shoot.  The whole team was involved in this process - it was about finding what people liked most, and what they felt reflected their work best. Critique was never personal.

Sometimes it was funny, often it was thought provoking, but it was never personal. I think if I were to describe it, I'd say it was trustworthy. We all had each others best interests at heart, because the best interests of the team were our best interests too. We'd formed into this incredible team, we'd developed skills and abilities and we'd honed our ability to work together, it made me feel complete trust in the team around me.

Then, we drafted an email to Annabel. Sophie and Sonia worked on this, while the photographers edited. Once we'd compiled our first selection of photographs, we sent them, along with the email, off to Annabel. Then it became a waiting game.

I was in London when I got a text from Sonia, telling me that Annabel had said yes. There's a photo of me, on Facebook, where I've taken a self-portrait with my mobile, and it's me with the biggest grin on my face at the news.

Being featured on Love My Dress was an absolute thrill - it was what we'd worked for, it was what we'd hoped for, and what we'd aimed for. And it was what we achieved. To us, it was a goal we wanted to achieve and we'd worked hard for it - so to see that come to fruition was fantastic.

Its always about setting new challenges, bigger ones, every time. Never settling to rest on your laurels, never settling to achieve the same level of success each time. Each time it's a venture further out, adding on something new, doing something a bit bigger, and never expecting to hear the word "no" before you've tried. Push a bit more, try a little more, experiment a bit more. The more I find things happening, and people saying yes, the more I realise there's a whole world of "yes" waiting for me out there. And I've heard plenty of "no" responses too - loads of them, but to be honest, I don't remember them. I remember the "yes" moments. That's not even about positive thinking - that's purely about the fact that I just simply don't remember rejections.

The best thing about this shoot, is it's made me see what I can do... and it's left me with lots of open doors of thought to new possibilities.

Photography on this page: Struve Photography
Photography - Zoe Campbell Photography + Mack Photography
Venue - House for an Art Lover, Glasgow
Dress Designer-Maker - Flossy and Dossy
Flowers - I Heart Flowers
Jewellery and Accessories - Gioia Mia
Stationery - Caroline Hill Wedding Stationery
Make-up Artist - Sophie Edwards
Hair Stylist - London Ross
Menswear - A Suit That Fits
Car - Nuvo Limousines
Gramophone and records - Butler and Taylor
Models - Emily Morton, Caeley Elcock, Jamie Hillen and Omar Zingaro Bhatia

Portrait of a lady

18th Century lady, originally uploaded by Kristin Mitchell photography.

So the past few weeks, I've been kept exceptionally busy.  As you might know, I already have a collection of qualifications in photography from college, but I recently signed up to a night class for a one-off course. 

When I left college last year, there was a photograph I'd created which to be honest, was what I'd call a bit of a slow burner. It took me a while to fall in love with it, but lots of other people seemed to like it a lot.  

It's this photograph, of a kite. 

The kite photograph was originally for an advertising concept, for wind energy. The outdoor image was shot first, then projected onto muslin cloth in a studio, and a kite was placed in front of the muslin.

After leaving college, I wished I'd experimented more with projections. So, when the chance came to do another class, and a self-initiated project, I decided to use projections again.

The inspiration for my project was old paintings and portraits, how aristocrats were portrayed in front of gorgeous vistas. So I started doing some digging around and more research. I decided to create modern portraits using projections to create the idea of someone sitting in front of a gorgeous vista.

It was a surprisingly big project. Although I created three portraits, the starting point was the background. I decided to take lots of pictures of backgrounds, so that I could bring out the richness in the shadow and detail in the lighter areas, much like traditional portrait painters would have done. If you look at almost any traditional painting, even in the darkest corner, it's not actually black paint; there's tiny details, in deep, dark rich colours, so subtle but still there. I wanted to make sure this wasn't lost with a camera, and took several photos, layering them in such a way to bring out the details and make it a rich palette of colour.

Next, was the portrait. The background was projected, but there had to be separate exposures - one for the background and another for the sitter; the background needed a longer exposure time than the sitter under the studio lights.

For two of the portraits, I hired dresses from Scottish Opera.

The portrait above, drew on inspiration from the 18th Century. I also created a portrait of a one of my regular models, Vivien Taylor, using a gorgeous early 19th Century Jane Austen period costume. The inspiration behind this picture can be found on Pinterest.

Finally, I took a leap into the 20th Century. I was very much curious about this image of Elizabeth II on her coronation by Cecil Beaton. What was curious to me, initially, was the angles of the background in relation to the chair and seating position of the Queen. In closer cropped images, the background is looking up, at an angle, into the roof, while the Queen sits straight on, towards the camera. This wider angle version hints that perhaps what we see behind the Queen isn't all it seems, but maybe a backdrop.

With this in mind, the lovely Wendy from Flossy and Dossy agreed to pose for me as my regal model. Here she's wearing a dress she made, with the tiara kindly borrowed from Gioia Mia. The interior of this shot was taken inside St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, and actually I think the flags and banners add an authenticity to the final image. Oh, and if you're wondering, yes, the clothes pegs were entirely intentional in the image - I wanted to show it wasn't simply a photoshop job, as people's awareness of image creation tends to become more cynical of how an image has been created.


The whole project kept me busy for the best part of seven weeks, including writing the proposal, sourcing background locations, photographing and editing the backgrounds, undertaking the research and constructing a research workbook, finding suitable dresses and props, as well as photographing and editing the images, printing them, and finally writing a evaluation. Both the proposal and evaluation had to be the length of an essay each.

So what do I get at the end of it? Well, enough credits, in conjunction with my previous college qualifications to undertake a single year's honours degree course, if I wish to do so. The alternative would have been to have spent a year full-time doing a degree course.

At this point in time, I have no intention on going back to college. While I enjoyed my time there, I don't feel that it's the right choice for me at this time. However, I always like to leave doors wide open when it comes to opportunities for the future, especially as this was very much a one-off night class. What I really got from it was the chance to explore projected backgrounds again in a large studio, and almost exclusive use of the studio for several weeks. It was also nice to do a more academic project again, and throw myself back into writing proposals and evaluations, and knowing that my work will be heavily critiqued and thoroughly evaluated by tutors.

For now though, its life back to normal and back to 21st century portraits!

Bridesmaid Revisited

I thought that today I'd share with you the images from the photoshoot I did last Thursday.

The shoot took place at the Hub, in Edinburgh (right next to Edinburgh Castle). One thing about the Hub is that its spire is actually the highest point in all of Edinburgh. 

My dressmaker for this was Wendy from Flossy and Dossy. We'd been talking about doing a bridesmaid wear shoot since October last year, following my previous shoot with her dresses at Viewpark Gardens.

We got together with Sonia from Gioia Mia who supplied the jewellery and fantastic head pieces; one of my favourite make up artists, Kathryn Hughes, and two models Sophie and Esther who looked absolutely gorgeous and radiated the demure glamour we needed. Both Wendy and Sonia provided bespoke, individual pieces for this shoot, which I think look gorgeous. Wendy even supplied the shoes, which she hand-painted to work with the dresses. You can see more about how she did that here:

http://flossyanddossy.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-shoes.html

To be honest, this was a dream shoot to work on. Everyone gave complete commitment and worked hard; the venue, The Hub, were fantastic at giving us the space to shoot; and the whole day couldn't have run more smoothly. 

Dresses: Flossy and Dossy www.flossyanddossy.co.uk
Jewellery and accessories: Gioia Mia www.gioiamia.net
Make up and hair: Kathryn Hughes
Models: Sophie Robertson and Esther Kungu www.estherkungu.com/
Photography: Kristin Mitchell www.kristinmitchell.co.uk
Location: The Hub, Edinburgh www.thehub-edinburgh.com/