A project influenced by Drew Gardner

Girl on Water Buffalo by Drew Gardner.

Back in March I posted about the photographer Drew Gardner. I am a big fan of his work and have for some time owned one of his DVD's in which he talks about setting up some of his shoots.

This inspired me to start a little project called 'lost in the woods'. A large part of Drew's technique is to do with the lighting. He uses studio lighting on location and basically drops the ambient light to a level where he can control the light on the subject using mobile studio lights. Other factors are the use of a smoke machine and conceptually, subject matter that stands out from the norm. I wanted to create a similar thing.

The project idea was called 'Lost in the Woods'. It was to be a semi fashion, semi story book sequence of images lit in a dramatic way. I would of course also need a model.

I am a member of Model Mayhem and a contact not to far from where I live came to mind as having the right look. I contacted Holly and explained what I wanted to do. She was more than enthusiastic and duly emailed me various clothing suggestions. We settled on the red dress and black tights. Next up some props!

I found a basket at a car boot sale and arranged it with artificial flowers. Something else was needed to take the shots just one step further away from the ordinary. Giant toadstools seemed to be the thing. I made several of these from paper mache. Lastly smoke for fog. I really wanted this to add some 'depth' to the shot, as Drew puts it. On the day this didn't work. I couldn't manage a proper smoke machine and the cans of party smoke were simply not up to the job - too much breeze.

One of my forest shots

All the elements were in place except lighting. For this I would use my speed lights. I have three with stands and some umbrellas as well as remote triggers to fire them.

On the day Vincent, a good friend came along to help with some of the kit as there was quite a lot to carry. He also held a flash unit with an umbrella most of the time as the wind was determined to blow this over.

Holly, our model, worked her socks off. There were various poses that required her to run and she was also happy to climb in among a tangle of vines as well as under a blown over tree.

The end result was a collection of images that I am very happy with. Not all the shots worked and there is of course no fog but hey, that's all part of learning. Above all though,  I think the objective to create a Drew Gardner inspired shoot was met!

More images from this shoot can be seen on my Flickr account. Just click on the images in the right margin.

UPDATE: I emailed Drew Gardner to check it was ok to use one of his images for this post and got an almost instant reply together with a valuable critique of the image above. Many thanks Drew -  well chuffed!