Editorial Photo Shoot Outcomes

One week before hand in and finally the weather was nice enough for me to go to the New Forest to Exbury Gardens to shoot my final category. I am so thankful for the team at Exbury Gardens for allowing me to use their gardens for my shoot, it was super fun and we spent time talking to visitors who were asking what we were up to and had the odd one stop and watch us as we shot which was nice to see. The day started off at 9am ready for Make Up and Hair, I had my designs and a picture in my head of how I wanted the whole look to look like, this did change slightly, with the hair being more wavy than big Hollywood curls, which references more of a SS16 trend than I originally went for so I am glad this turned out the way it did. The make up was identical to how I wanted, I had fun doing my models look, especially her eyes, they were so easy and stress free to work on and I am really pleased at the subtle cut crease I did.  I am glad I made the decision to work backwards on this shoot, the last images were taken first so I could remove the dark red lip colour and tie the hair back to shoot the first two images last.

My model, photographer and myself set off for Exbury Gardens around lunchtime giving us plenty of time to shoot. Locations are my favourite settings for photo shoots because you have so much more creativity and space to experiment and get shots you wouldn't have necessarily thought of. Driving up to Exbury meant we drove pretty much all the way through the new forest over the Cattle Grids and into the woodland areas which were so beautiful I only wish I had a little more time to stop on the way back. All the team were bouncing ideas back and fourth about shoots we could do there, in the pond and lake areas so hopefully we get to go back one day during the summer!

I had planned to only go to certain areas on the Gardens I had been shown photos of to minimize the time spent wandering and to maximize the time we had to shoot, which turned out to be the best idea. Exbury is HUGE and we would have had to spend all day walking round. I had to do a little touch up on my model while on location as we had to do the make up in the studios before arriving at Exbury due to them having no where to accommodate us to do so. The first area we visited was the Wisteria Tree, which was a little bare than I wanted it to be but we worked with it because the Pillars were beautiful! We moved onto the Bell Area of the gardens and took a few pictures here before moving onto the Brick Bridge and The Top Lake.

Overall, this was probably the most amazing and fun photo shoot experience since starting University. The process of dealing with a bigger team, liaising with the staff at the Gardens was all really fun to do. The images, which amounted to around 400!, were narrowed down somehow to 15, then 10 and then 7. The final 7 images, which are mixed in with the images below are my favourites from the shoot and I can not narrow them down any more. Hopefully because they are being laid out in a magazine format being one single page and 3 double pages, this wont be an issue!