Downtown OKC Fashion Session

I really enjoy doing fashion photography. I never paid much attention to fashion in the past, but the more I do fashion photography the more fun it is. You won't see me in an Armani suit anytime soon, but I love taking new-edge fashion photographs and creating unique, interesting look.

For this shoot my daughter Emily called and said her best friend Melinda was in from out of state, and she wanted to see if we could do a quick fashion shoot. Melinda had never modeled before. I didn't have time for a full studio gig, so we decided to just meet for an hour in downtown OKC and see what we could put together. Emily and I have similar tastes and we wanted something edgy, gritty, and with dramatic lighting.

I brought only minimal equipment. We did this entire shoot with my D2x, 28-70 F2.8 lens, two SB-800's connected to Pocket Wizard receivers, a couple of Bogen light weight stands, my homemade snoots and a Westcott 42" folding umbrella. After meeting at Java Dave's coffee shop on 10th street near downtown, we drove a couple of blocks to a nearby alleyway, picked an old building and just started photographing. We had several comments from people passing by, but that didnt' slow us down. After shooting in stairwell, we moved to a building a block away that was being gutted and worked in there for a few minutes. In all the shoot took less than an hour, we had fun and got some pretty cool pictures.
Melinda was inexperience in how to work in front of the camera but with Emily's guidance she became more comfortable as the session progressed. A few more times and she will feel totally comfortable. Some people think modeling looks easy, but my experience is that like taking cool photographs, modeling is much harder than it looks.

To get the gritty, urban look I post processed in Nikon Capture NX and added the sepia toning, lots of contrast, and in fact added quite a bit of grain to make the pictures look more gritty and edgy. For the top two pictures I used a bare head flash and wanted the hard edge shadows as part of the composition. In the third pictureI used the Westcott umbrella to soften the light, and in the 4th picture I again used a bare flash, but dialed down to 1/64 power to add just a bit of fill to the picture.