Welcome to the latest in my series of creative collaborations which have the express purpose of helping me to grow my photography portfolio as well as grow connections, grow confidence and grow creatively - basically it’s all about growth!
On my travels through this universe I have had the pleasure of meeting some really cool, talented and interesting people - on very special occasions I sometimes have the opportunity to work with them and for that I am supremely grateful! My latest (and perhaps greatest) collaboration so far has been with the very wonderfully talented Chanel Joan Elkayam!
The background to this shoot is that I met Chanel a few years ago when I was 2nd shooting for my friend Ruth, ever since then it has been wonderful to see how Chanel has grown into her amazing success as an Industry recognised Fashion Designer, Chanel is the youngest person to have showcased at all 4 of the major fashion shows London, Paris, New York and Milan and she achieved all of this by the age of 18 - basically she’s the real deal! As you can tell I am full of admiration for Chanel’s achievements and I can’t wait to see where her journey takes her next! you can see more of her work HERE.
For this shoot we wanted to showcase some of Chanel’s fashion designs in a natural setting, we chose Dovestones as our location in part because it’s really local for us both and also because it’s amazingly beautiful too! The weather even behaved itself and gave us lots of lovely sunlight to play with too.
I relied on my now favourite combination of the Pentax 67 as primary camera and Nikon F2 as a second body - this set up gives me tip top quality lenses in both medium format and 35mm and I just really like working with them both. Filmwise it was again an all Kodak affair with Portra 400 loaded in the P67 and a couple of rolls of Portra 800 and a cheeky roll of Kodak Pro image 100 for the F2.
It was so much fun working with Chanel on this shoot, and also a huge thank you to Chanel’s mum too who joined us - it was really lovely to meet her and a big thank you for taking the behind the scenes photos you can see at the start of this blog too! :)
We managed to shoot 4 different looks over the course of a few hours on a sunny afternoon at Dovestones, I really feel like these are some of my best images to date and of course a major part of this is down to Chanel and her amazing designs as well as her talent in front of the lens too, Chanel was lots of fun to work with and made my job easy!
Enough talk!! Here’s some of my fave shots…
So there we go! We got so many great shots together!! I really enjoyed this shoot and loved working with Chanel and her amazing designs. On the technical side of things once again Portra 400 has proven itself to be utterly dependable in mixed lighting situations and every time it renders beautiful tones, contrast and colours - for this shoot I rated it all at 400. Also once again Kodak Pro Image is proving to be another wonderful addition to the line up and some of my fave 35mm shots were from this film :)
The Pentax 67 continues to astound me with the image quality it’s capable of and it’s just so flipping enjoyable to shoot with - here’s to many more creative collaborations to come!