Location Fashion Photography - Blogger Collaboration with VivalaViv

It's nice to work on a one-frock collaboration with 'personal style blogger' Vivienne Shui of vivalaViv. Vivienne has what seems to me to be a completely unique fashion blog. She uses either newly created; or existing images from her large photographic archive of her modelling-dresses-from-her-personal-collection. These carefully art directed images are the springboard for beautifully written short stories about her relationship with the dress that is being presented. How or why it was purchased, where it was first worn, even inspiration behind buying a particular dress in the first place. What you might call a real history of personal fashion!

Although Vivienne had photographed this dress before, the styling for this shot was decided on by myself at her invitation. My idea was to put the large circle stripe sun hat with the black lace dress and the selected shoes, primarily for their black lace cuff as a stylistic match with the lace top and wide hem of the skirt of the vintage SPAZIO dress. The pictures were taken on location in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens late October 2013.

On arrival at the gardens I immediately took advantage of  a splash of reflected light on the The Governor Phillip Fountain, simply because it was too good to resist! But Vivienne had already decided that we would photograph against the sandstone monument down at Farm Cove, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates replica. This is a monument I love, however I was wary of photographing in front of it having produced one of my all time favourite fashion images in front of it back in 1988 using both Hasselblad 500CM and a vintage/antique Ensign 6x9 camera(s). I suppose I am somewhat superstitious and wary of tempting fate to deliver two superb images at exactly the same place! But the time had come to photograph here again, for both of us as it turned out..

This time around the camera was the lovely Fujifilm X-Pro1 which produces superb image files, all the Choragic Monument shots are taken with the Fuji XF35mmF1.4 R lens. I was hoping to relive the look and feel somewhat of shooting with the Hasselblad with it's 80mm standard lens and with the addition of a little post work in Photoshop I think achieved just that, this time in a rectangular format...

The picture selected for the vivalaViv blog post.

Light-splash, reflected of a Sydney skyscraper.

The fountain shots were made with Vivienne's own Nikon D90 (just because..) and the sandstone monument pictures were made with my Fuji X-Pro1 as mentioned earlier. All the images as can clearly be seen have been processed a little differently, all were finished in Photoshop, fountain pictures Nikon RAW converted in Capture NX2; with only the final selected vivalaViv image being photo finished from the Fuji RAW file, RAW converted in the dedicated Silkypix software. All the other Fuji images are 'developed' from the X-Pro1 nearly-as-good-as-RAW JPEG files.

You can read the story of the dress, here VivalaViv - One Dress two Looks.

And for those who have read this far, here's a link to that shot I mentioned from 1988, it seems the wind was blowing a gentle breeze on both days all those years apart! Adriane - Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.

Need fashion shot on location? Call me, Kent Johnson 0433 796 863- Sydney Australia.