Friday, March 21, 2008

STYLING my first PHOTO SHOOT

I have spent the last 2 days in Orange County styling for a photo shoot. It was exhausting, fulfilling, thought provoking, tedious, creative, interesting, maddening, super fun and weird! My boss and I have been scouting and gathering modern, organic & asian inspired props all week - purchased and memoed from high end stores, asian markets, grocery stores, borrowed from friends, nurseries, pilfered from my apartment, found on the street and ordered from the internet - flatware, glass jars bottles & glasses, kale, a container made of laminated newspaper, thai red snapper, coconuts, sake, plum wine, fine china, champagne in bulk, heads of lettuce, oranges, chrome chairs, books, aged bowls, board shorts & flip flops, odd objects, lemons, purple carrots, interesting fruit & vegetable varieties, woks, a million bowls, bamboo steamers, vases, lucite, leather boxes, large quantities of SOS cleansing pads, orange rubber gloves, cool old fashioned soap bars, japanese pumpkin snacks, cleansing products, chopsticks, brown paper towels, knives, chop blocks - anyhew, we arrived Thursday night at 9pm in 2 cars full of items - unloaded, cleared out the entire kitchen so it was a blank slate and began to figure out what would be used in the photo shoot and where. We worked steadily and sweatily till we couldn't think clearly (3am) - alarms were set for 6am and we were at it again - rearranging, stuffing fish with lemons, hitting up starbucks, combing the grocery store for more flowers, 6 more bunches of parsley, more brown paper towels (we had come up with an idea for the pantry where each shelf had either plants from the nursery still in their flats or multiple brown paper towel rolls)...Next, I frantically ran all over Laguna Niguel and Dana Point in search of more bamboo steamers (it was decided that an exaggerated quantity of steamers could be interesting on camera) - at 10am sharp, the photographers arrived. At this time, I popped some asprin, downed more coffee and quickly had to forget I was sleep deprived, delirious and hungry so that I could kick into high gear to stay ahead of each shot...This is when our vision became a reality and it all became fun. The pictures were BEAUTIFUL. After 7 hours of shooting the room from every angle, making 3 more emergency grocery store runs and capturing all the detail shots, I finally packed up and headed home - all in a weeks work! These pictures where all before the photographers arrived so A LOT changed and got BETTER! I can't wait to see the final product. Thank you Mom and Jen for taking all my frantic calls chock full of bizarre questions!

It took 3 hours to get the bookshelves just right
Beginning of the layering... the smoked mirror behind the cooktop was challenging to photograph


a 3am shot
The Thai Red Snapper

playful detail shot with repetition of basic household cleaning supplies in the pull outs - the real shot had running water and bubbles

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

looks like you made friends with the stuffed fish. ewh totally gross! But seems like a lot of fun, beautiful job I must say!

Brooke and Peter said...

wow, looks like a ton of work... and how fun! it's all in the details. you have a real talent. i liked the fish.

Anonymous said...

What was the photo shoot for?

hub of the house said...

J - This is a kitchen we designed that we needed to shoot for our website, portfolio AND to pitch around to different publications...

Anonymous said...

photo shoots always sound like fun but they end just sucking the life out of you. looks like this one came out great. congrats.