Rachel Wallace is back on the blog for her second outing. Rachel is another one of my subjects becoming a regular on my blog. Although this is just our second shoot, we had our third a few days after this one and the fourth is in the works. She is tied with Alyson who is heading for shoot no. 4 also.
Score keeping aside, there was a business end to this shoot, and indeed all my shoots with Rachel. The brief for this shoot had two parts. This shoot was filmed for parts of Rachels bio/introduction piece on ICA book camp, which will be on RTE next month. The first part of the brief was to stage a shoot for TV. The shoot images were also used for a spread in the Irish sun which was Published on Feb 23rd, that was the second part of the brief.
Rachel is fantastic to work with. A re-cap of Rachel’s story can be found in the post on our first shoot HERE. She is still with Assets and going strong, getting plenty of work. The ICA book camp should be a real boost to Rachel’s profile once it is aired and no doubt she will go great in the final.
This shoot was in the Bewley’s Hotel in Ballsbridge. They kindly lent us a room for a few hours for the TV crew to do an interview and for us to shoot for a bit. This is the second time I have shoot here, the first time being over a year ago with for my Day with Hannah.
This shoot was styled by Nicole Spain of Flutterby Fashion Styling. This was my first time to work with Nicole directly. She styled the shoot for Lisa and Faye before but unfortunately could not attend that shoot. It was great working with Nicole on this shoot. Penny’s supplied the lingerie, which looked great on Rachel. The hair extensions were by Hotloxs Hair Extensions and styled by the great team at Blow Salons.
Ironically, the images that you see here are none of the images that you will see being shot on the TV show. After Rachel finished her 15mins interview, we had to get cracking on a shoot…. or pretend to shoot so the camera can get some footage of a shoot in progress. I didnt really set up lights proper or anything. We were just shooting for the sake of shooting…. so you have been warned in advice of watching the shot and thinking that they are crap shots :).
So the shoot had two briefs, a shoot for the sake of a shoot and a shoot for getting some press images. Upon arriving at the hotel early with my gear to recon the location, I had the sneaky suspicion that the room that was organise would be the standard hotel room that they have. Under normal circumstances, this would be a fine room but it is just too small for a photo shoot, let alone a TV interview. Lights, sound man, camera man, director, assistance, Nicole, Rachel and my self, it was going to get cramped.
I got the key card and went up to the room and my suspicions about a small room were realised. I didn’t unpack any gear until the TV crew arrived. I was hoping the the producer who organise the room initially would be able to see if there was a larger room available, and so their was. We moved a few floors up and we now had a bigger room with more space.
So the TV crew got into prep mode and started to set up the camera, hot lights etc etc. I set up my Elinchrom lights and softboxes to be used as some props in the background…. Rachel was supposed to be on the set of a photoshoot after all. The Elinchroms worked great…. apart from the cooling fan that kicked in every so often. The noise from the tiny fans was enough to put off the sound in the interview. Luckily they cool down pretty quick, so after a minute of it being off, we turned be back on and it was good to go again for another few minutes.
Once the TV crew got that they needed…… which was mostly some random photos been taking and some useless direction by me, they were off. Once they were gone, that left Rachel, Nicole and my self to work away and start getting our stuff done. Nicole had a selection of items for us to shoot. Some of those included lingerie from Pennny’s and t-shirts from another company.
Lighting wise, there was nothing new or ground breaking here. I did how ever crack out the Orbis Ring Flash out of hibernation. I haven’t used it since Aug of last year. I used it for all the shots of Rachel on the bed as I wanted to give it a try….. no other reason really. I could have used the other lights that I had with me, such as the Elinchroms. I suck with the Orbis anyway for this look. It was armed with a 580-II and triggered via E-TTL cord. I was shooting in E-TTL move with +1 EV Flash compensation. This is needed as I find that I need to up the juice a bit of the flash when using the Orbis.
Thats all for now, any comments or questions, holla below.
