Darcy Clothing are a local company that I have started to work with recently. Darcy are a Wexford based fashion label. Darcy is a trend driven well priced fashion brand. Their main focus is great design, exceptional quality at affordable prices. Darcy is available in over 40 Retailer across Ireland. Check them out on FaceBook to find out who stocks them: https://www.facebook.com/darcyclothing

I am currently working with Darcy in shooting all their new pieces for their lookbook and catalogues. All fashion labels need images of their product to be able to put on websites to shot customers what they are buying and also to be able to give images to retails to give shot their customers.

These shots were all about the cloths and their details. In an editorial or fashion shoot for a magazine, it would be acceptable to perhaps not see the cloths fully as those images are more about the style, the story and the model etc. These are catalogue shots and just to shot the cloths, such as shot on the right which shows the all the detail in the black dress.

It is very easy to get the exposure wrong for dark clothing. If you are using a camera in automatic mode, you will run into the immediate problem of the camera thinking that every thing is dark and wants to try increase exposure by increasing the shutter time.

When shooting manual, you have total control over the exposure, especially in the studio. The key to bringing out the detail in black clothing is to have plenty of fill light to lighten the shadows. In the shot on the right, I have the fill light about about 1 stop below the key light. The fill light was coming from a 2m x 1m light diffusion panel, just to the front/left of the model. The key light was from an Elinchrom 130cm octabank boomed high, directly over the model… this also providing a soft light and helping to soften shadows.

All of the shots above are large Jpegs are straight out of the camera ( Canon 1d IV) on natural portrait style.