Karl Bowman Runway Show 2012

I was asked to shoot Karl Bowman's 2012 runway show at the weekend. Karl's passion and enthusiasm for his art is infectious and shooting with him is always great fun and it was a shoot that I've been looking forward to.

Karl and his team put a staggering amount of work into the show, not just in creating a collection of more than 57 truly outstanding couture dresses, but also in the whole production and organisation of the night. With so much time and energy going into a single, one-night-only event, there's a lot of pressure on the people documenting it to do a good job. Which is as it should be, and I do get a massive kick from playing some small part in this kind of event.

 

 

Happily, it wasn't just down to me to cover the event; the thoroughly professional Pete and Lou from Pink Tulip Photography( http://www.pinktulip.co.uk) were also on hand shooting stills, along with Andy Murray and the Red Squirrel Blues crew shooting video.

I went to to the dress rehearsal the night before the show, just to get a sense of what I was going to be shooting and take a few tests. SVL's Sam Viney was in charge of stage design and lighting, which is always a good thing. The venue's limited power supply meant the whole show was lit with the remarkably efficient LED spots. With their ability to reproduce pretty much any colour, the LEDs made from some interesting shooting conditions.

 

While photographers usually only need to nail a couple of key shots at an event like this, Karl had specifically asked me to get at least one usable shots of every dress.

The shots that I envisaged working the best were tracking the models down the catwalk with a long lens. Working with fairly low light, moving subjects and a long lens isn't the best recipe for getting consistently great shots. And if you miss the framing or don't quite get the focus, you can't stop the show and ask the model to go again. My back up plan was to use a second camera on a tripod, set to get a wider safety shot that was pre-focussed on the end of the end of the stage. When the models reach the end of the catwalk they stop, pose, turn, giving me time to hit the release on my second camera.

With at least two models on the catwalk at any one time, I just had to keep track of them both and remember to go to the second camera each time one of them reached the end of the stage. How hard could it be..?

 I'm still editing the full set, but very happy with the coverage I got.

And now that the dresses have been unveiled to the world, I can get on with finishing and publishing shots from the latest studio session that we did with Karl a few weeks ago...