Bloomingdales photo-shoot

What a crazy day! I had my first official photo-shoot for Bloomingdales! The shoot included two spreads (a series of photographs that tells a story) for the August and September catalogue. I woke up at 5a.m. got into the city at 8:20, and arrived at Drive In Studios in Chelsea at 9. In preparing for the styling of the shoot, I spent the previous two days at Bloomingdales's corporate offices on the upper east side. The store is beautiful and has some really amazing clothes.
Preparing for a photo-shoot can mean a lot of different things depending on who its for. Since this was Bloomingdales, it was fairly simple as far as the clothes because we just used apparel from the store. When you're shooting for magazines and such, all the clothes are borrowed from agencies so the retuning and keeping track of everything can get very confusing when you have 10 or so racks of clothes all from different places. Anyway, two days before me and the styling assistant named Hannah, organized the first round of pulls (the clothes initially picked for the photo-shoot). We also took pictures of the shoes and filed paperwork to ensure all the clothes were properly checked out.
The day before is the meeting between the stylist, creative director and photographer. What an editorial looks like is really a collaboration between these three people, with the creative director taking the lead. In that meeting everyone looks over the clothes with the jewelry - which was the focus in this case. After we had a rough idea of the direction we wanted to go, Isabel, Hannah and me went to get more clothes. In this case, it meant we went into Bloomingdales, each took a floor and grabbed anything that was close to our color scheme. Finally, we packed all the clothes, filed the paperwork and got everything ready to be shipped to the studio the next morning.

The Day of the Shoot:
When I got to the studio at 9, me and Hannah unpacked all the clothes and laid out the jewelry. When the model got there, she went into hair and make-up while Isabel, the creative director, and the photographer chose final looks. By 10:30, we had the model on set and doing test shots. From here on out, my job was mostly waiting around. The whole team was extremely meticulous about every detail. Of course you have to be for this job, but the whole day lasted longer than usual. By 12, we had tried about three different dresses with the Gucci jewelry, and finally got 'thee' shot. This is basically what a photo-shoot is like. The creative team talks and debates and tries a million different options before everyone is happy. Mine and the stylists assistants job was to change the model and pack up at the end of the day. It was an amazing experience and I can't wait for next week! Were shooting an editorial for Marie Claire magazine, so its going to be all about the clothes and the fall trends. And thats all the fun stuff.

behind the scene photos coming this weekend!