A few weeks ago I was invited to the old Novaks building to shoot a challenge with two pretty awesome people. Eman from Mystery Man Photo and model superstar, Megan Pretzel! The premise of the challenge? Find items in the dollar store to implement in a shoot. It was decided while we were walking around to pick a foreground item, a prop and a background item. Below i've taken some stills from the YouTube video that you can watch in full at the bottom. Lets take a look at what we came up with!
Foreground:
If you've noticed that blank look on my face you can probably tell I had no idea how this was going to turn out. But I chose a magnifying glass as the foreground. My plan was to distort the lens to get a crazy lens baby type effect. Not sure it worked entirely but it was definitely a challenge. I had to use the widest lens I had otherwise the images would have been too cropped to be usable. What I really did not anticipate was how this would impact the focus. Autofocus? Nope. Manual focus? Yea, sort of. I found that when using a 35mm lens that it simply could not focus on subjects more than 3 feet away from the camera. I also decided I wanted to use a clock as a prop. This was probably a bad choice for foreground but no turning back now!
Prop:
This is a great example of looking at the picture of a product and getting fooled into thinking you can pull off the same thing. There was a lovely picture of a tutu on the packaging of this vibrant selection but in the end we were too lazy and just ended up wrapping Megan in the stuff :)
Background:
Vaper...vaporwear....whaaa? I had to google the term "vaporwave" before writing this blog because...WTF is vaporwave. Apparently I'm old but maybe not old enough? The background chosen by Eman was a lovely shade of blue. Combined with the burn your eyes fluorescence of the pink tutu scam, we get Vaporwear!(Trademark not pending.) I'm pretty sure this is wrapping paper and if you watch the sped up video you can see me walking around aimlessly offering no help whatsoever. What you can't see is the bowl of amazing snacks i was frequenting during this portion of the day.
Conclusion:
This was a really fun project to be a part of. It was more challenging than I had originally thought and that really is a good thing. I've been shooting professionally for over 12 years now and its not every day that I step outside of my comfort zone so this was a breath of fresh air. I want to thank both Megan and Eman for sharing their creative minds and talents with me. If you should find yourself in need of a model or photographer in the future, you really couldn't do much better than these two.
I've included a few final shots from our adventures for you to take in. More importantly though, go watch the video! Also subscribe to Eman's YouTube channel!
