The Making of “Gone With The Wind”

gone with the wind

The more I shoot, the more I find myself annoyed by the clothing options. I have an idea in my mind, but the clothes are nowhere to be found. More often than not, I end up making something out of fabric. For “Gone With The Wind”, I knew I wanted red fabric floating in the background, but I had little idea how to make an actual dress out of it. Thankfully, Kate is pretty damn good at making a long sheet of fabric look like a kind of relevant article of clothing :).

The challenge for this shoot wasn’t just the dress though, it was the lighting. I knew I wanted there to be light falloff in certain areas and because of the height of the fabric I also knew we would need lights placed very, very high. With a lot of experimentation, we finally ended up with a Mola beauty dish low in the front, and then a strip soft box flagged off in the upper corner.

gone with the wind

Ted then stood on a ladder where he dropped the fabric from high while Kate did her selected poses. Turns out fabric doesn’t just fall perfectly every time, so there was a lot of trial and error. Plus timing the drop, the pose and the flash took a bit of practice.

After a while though we got the hang of it!

Huge thanks to Kate for all the jumping and bending in a very makeshift dress, thanks to Ted for finding the perfect way to drop a long piece of fabric (just adding to the wafting resume, aren’t we?) and to Jenna Master’s for the BTS pics. These were some of my favorites yet!

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

So after a VERY long day of shooting, everything was cleaned up in editing to create what you see below. Awesome job to everyone, I couldn’t have done it without you! 😀

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

gone with the wind

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July 22, 2013

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9 Comments

  1. Reply

    theoriginaladriana

    May 19, 2014

    Beautiful photos! Thank you for the BTS photos and information, super interesting!

    • Reply

      jennamartinphoto@gmail.com

      May 20, 2014

      Thank you!! 😀

  2. Reply

    Sophie Thionville

    June 2, 2014

    These photos are SO beautiful!

    • Reply

      jennamartinphoto@gmail.com

      June 2, 2014

      Thank you Sophie! 😀

  3. Reply

    Juan

    October 26, 2014

    Perfect

  4. Reply

    Ruben van Straten

    December 5, 2014

    Hi Jena, wonderfull pictures that leave me with a question. Did you accomplish the black background via postprocessing or via your camera settings? When I use a grey backdrop I never seem to be able to end up with a black background, despite that it should be possible, as I heard. I hope you will explain this to me. Thanks

    • Reply

      jennamartinphoto@gmail.com

      December 5, 2014

      Hi Ruben! Yup, this was done on a black backdrop, but then it was adjusted in Photoshop. Even though it was black, it was a smaller backdrop so she had to be fairly close to it, so that meant there was a lot of light falloff onto the backdrop. I used photoshop to extend the background on some photos, and darken it on all of them, creating a completely back background.

      If you’re using a grey background, you’ve got to be super careful about the light falloff. So you’d have to pull your subject far away from it and make your camera settings are only picking up the light on the subject, not the background (keep ambient light from getting to your camera). Or you could darken it in Photoshop…two different approaches :).

  5. Reply

    Ruben van Straten

    December 9, 2014

    Thanks for the explanation, from the BTS pictures I thought it to be a grey backdrop, hence my question.

    • Reply

      jennamartinphoto@gmail.com

      December 9, 2014

      Oh, I gotcha! Thanks Ruben 🙂

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