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I had the honor of leading a Street Fashion Photo Walk at this year’s PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. This was a two-hour walk that was advertised as an opportunity for photographers to spend two hours with me on the Friday morning of PhotoPlus 2018.
The Photo Walk Description
Street Fashion Photo Walk with Olympus Visionary Joe Edelman
Street fashion is a big part of the New York fashion scene, and on this photo walk, you will learn techniques to create dynamic street fashion shots and portraits in almost any location. Joe will show you how to find interesting backgrounds, identify great natural light, and use reflectors to enhance it. Joe will also share lenses and aperture settings to control your backgrounds, how to interact with and direct your subject, and some simple posing tips for full-length and portrait-style compositions.
Scroll to the bottom to see finished images.
Since my educational mission is to teach photographers about the HOWs and WHYs behind making great photographs, I frequently use my teaching opportunities to try to take photographers out of their comfort zone to experience new things and to develop a sincere appreciation for KISS IT – Keep It Super Simple. This photo walk was no different, and I wanted to take the time to share with you my HOWs and WHYs behind how I planned the walk and shot the images you see throughout this article.
The Plan
I knew this would be a small group of photographers, and since they were each spending $150.00 in addition to the cost of getting into the Expo, I knew they would be serious about learning and open to new ideas.
Photographers who attend events like this routinely list “learning how to pose” and “learning the best way to communicate with a model” as their two most important goals, followed closely by “learning more about lighting”.
While two hours sounds like a lot of time, it really isn’t when you are moving from place to place, teaching, and photographing. I make it a priority to minimize my personal shooting time because I really don’t feel there’s much value in having people watch me take a photo if I am not taking the time to really break down the thought process.
My goal was to keep the locations close together, give short demos, and then give the attending photographers plenty of time to shoot and interact one-on-one with the model at each location. I’d watch over their shoulders and give them suggestions or ask them to try something dramatically different from what they are doing to get them out of their comfort zone.
The Prep
The key to any good shoot is preparation. I’ve been to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center many times. Still, I had never considered it a shooting location, and I knew the blocks around the Javits Center weren’t exactly picturesque. The High Line was an option, but it is also one of the most photographed areas of New York, so I didn’t want to do anything that obvious.
I made a trip from my home base of Allentown, PA, to New York about two weeks before the expo to do my location scouting. To my delight, I quickly realized that the lower street level of the Javits Center was a complex of concrete shapes and textures, including walls, curbs, sidewalks, pillars, and stairs. These geometric shapes immediately reminded me of the fashion photos that appeared in Life and Look magazines in the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s. These monochrome gray settings actually created great, simple backgrounds with very few distractions.
Location Scouting – Two weeks before the shoot
I also realized that the weather could be a serious factor, since the photo walk was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. on a Friday in late October, when cool temperatures were likely, and lighting would be unpredictable.
All of this information led me to decide to do the entire photo walk just outside the Javits Center on the ground level, using the geometric shapes and simple gray color of the poured concrete as my background.
I understood that the light grey concrete would also function as an excellent reflector regardless of the weather. The concrete sidewalks also serve the same function: providing a nice fill to soften shadows under the chin and nose, as well as helping create catchlights in the eyes.
It was decided that my model would be the beautiful Gabrielle, whom I first met while doing a test shoot with a local makeup artist and whom I had just photographed for Olympus in this video about the PEN E-PL9.
She is tall and has striking eyes, and since this was a street fashion project, I had to place more emphasis on the outfit and overall look and feel of the image. I had seen a photo of Gabrielle on her Instagram profile, wearing a white sweater dress with knee-high gray boots. I thought this outfit would be perfect for providing just a bit of contrast to the grey walls, while still keeping the color scheme somewhat monochromatic.
The next concern was Gabrielle’s hair. She has beautiful long hair that on a breezy day would quickly become a mess. Knowing there was no way to predict how much wind would be swirling around the Javits Center the morning of the photo walk, I wanted a hairstyle that would be easy to manage and not look windblown. With the help of my makeup artist, we decided on a high ponytail to lift her hair back and keep it off her face at all times.
I also knew that Gabrielle was very sensitive to bright sunlight and tended to squint in those situations. I experienced this firsthand during our shoot in Dumbo, Brooklyn. So I brought along a pair of white-framed sunglasses that I knew I could use to prevent squinting, just as a prop on her head.
The Shoot
The morning of the shoot was cold. There was a slight breeze early on, but New York spared us the blustery winds that often occur along the river. The day was very overcast, so the sky felt like a giant overhead softbox. The upside – no harsh shadows and very little squinting from my model. The downside – the soft, even light, along with my monochromatic concrete and white dress – had the potential for very flat images.
“All great photographs are the result of great problem-solving.” This has always been my philosophy as a photographer. This photo walk was no different. I had gambled on the monochrome theme, and, as Murphy’s Law would have it, Mother Nature provided very flat, uninteresting lighting. Since my original inspiration came from black-and-white fashion images from old Life and Look magazines, I decided to work in black and white and teach the attendees how to create a fashion story based on this monochromatic theme. This fashion story would include images that showed the model and the setting. It would include three-quarter length and close-up shots as well.
This concept would give me ample opportunity to explain how to find interesting backgrounds in the most boring of places and how to find good light. Because we were on the ground level at the Javits Center, we were also tucked away from the crowds of photographers entering the main hall and the rush of New Yorkers going by on the street.
The Gear & Images
I shot all of the images with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and an M.Zuiko 12-100mm F4 PRO Lens. It was essential to work quickly and maintain a consistent shutter speed and aperture combination to ensure no camera or subject motion and softer backgrounds when using the longer focal lengths on the zoom. All of the images @ 1/400sec @ F4. I allowed the camera to set my ISO—YES, AUTO ISO. My ISO ranged from ISO 200 to ISO 500.
I worked with various focal lengths from 12mm (24mm Full Frame equivalent) to 100mm (200mm Full Frame equivalent). I did shots with some distortion and others with nice soft bokeh in the background. YES – soft backgrounds with an F4 lens on a micro four thirds camera!
I was able to shoot a few frames at the beginning of each setup – here are the finished images: Click previews to enlarge.
Post Production
It is important to note that when I shoot in black and white, I set my camera’s color profile to Monochrome. I also increased the contrast in the Monochrome profile to +2 so that the images appearing on my LCD screen and in the EVF have the look and feel of Black-and-White images shot on Tri-X film, which was the go-to film in the 70s and 80s.
I do this so I am confident that the way I am setting up my shot and exposing it will make a good black-and-white image. Back in the film days, a photographer would light and expose one way for black-and-white film and then light and expose very differently for color film. When digital came along and the ability to click a button and suddenly have a black-and-white image, photographers started getting lazy, and instead of creating great black-and-white images, the trend became using black and white to save a bad color image.
Since I am shooting raw, the camera is still recording the color image, so I do all my retouching for skin blemishes and fly-away hairs in Photoshop, and then I use the Nik Silver Efex 2 plugin from DxO for my black-and-white conversion. Settings will vary from shot to shot, but here are my basic black-and-white conversion settings for this shoot.
Summary
A good learning experience is one that makes you think and step out of your comfort zone. It challenges your style and preferences. Most importantly, a good learning experience is NOT the time to be adding photos to your portfolio. I was fortunate to have a great group of attendees who embraced those values and went home with some new tools and skills to create with.
I hope you found this information useful. Now go pick up that camera and shoot something! Because – “Your BEST shot is your NEXT shot!” — Joe Edelman
