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The Starving Artist

Tag Archives: Ebay

What do you do when your wedding dress is covered in fake blood !

08 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Bridal Photography, General

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bride, China, cleaning, Ebay, Formal Wear, photography, wedding dress, Weddings

Morning

Following on from my recent, Bride with a difference post I thought I’d share a little “post shoot” information with you – but don’t try this at home if your wedding dress is worth £2000 🙂

The wedding gowns that I use for photo shoots are all imports from China, with Chinese prices to boot and so usually I’m not too bothered when one of my gowns is covered in muck and grime – I throw them away if they cannot be salvaged and import another.

The day after my shoot I received another enquiry for bridal wear shoot, the client to be was a size ten (UK) and to my horror the only dress I had in a size ten was one which was now sitting in a holdall under my desk, covered in fake blood, dirt, grass, concrete dust, you name it, it was covered in it.

What could I do? I could get another from Ebay, but deliveries are up to three weeks and this client wanted to shoot sooner than that.

Taking the dress out of the holdall I just knew that this should go straight in the bin, and I’d have to turn my client down. But then I thought, why don’t I ask the person that should know all about cleaning wedding gowns, Jill, from the local bridal boutique

Well, when I told her the story, her answer amazed me, “Just stick it in the washing machine on 30 degrees wash, it’ll be fine” she said. “Then hang it up for a couple of days to let the creases fall out”.

So that’s what I did, wedding gown, straight in the washing machine, 30 degrees wash, 1 hour later, looking as good as new 🙂

I can tell you I was pleased as punch, not only did this save my bacon this time, but it also means I can wash all my gowns instead of disposing of them when they are too dirty – but please – don’t put a gown in the wash if you plan to wear it for your wedding day – mine was a £50 gown!! A £2000 gown would have been professionally dry cleaned!!

Best – Colin

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Bride with a difference

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Bridal Photography, Photography

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Corpse Bride, Ebay, Make Up Artist, photography, Photoshop, SFX, SFX Make Up, wedding dress, Weddings

Afternoon

I don’t photograph weddings, but I do shoot a lot of women in wedding gowns. When I had my studio I was lucky enough to be on the same business park as Hazlewood Bridal Boutique our towns’ newest and best bridal boutique. It wasn’t long before I struck up a friendship with the owner, Jill, and we were soon collaborating on photo-shoots together.

We stopped shooting location based shoots when one of her best gowns became rather sodden during a shoot up at a stately home, you can read about that here

Since moving out of my studio I have been asked to shoot much more Bridal stuff, especially out on location and knowing Jill would baulk at the idea of loaning me a £2000 wedding gown for a shoot out on some disused building site of a location I decided to see what Ebay had to offer.

Ebay has a surprising amount of Bridal Wear stockists, mostly in the far east and China, but the good thing is they come with Chinese price tags too! So after stocking up on a number of these throw away bridal gowns I carried on taking booking for bridal shoots on location

The trouble is, there are only so many pictures of pretty girls in wedding gowns you can take, after a time they all blur into the same type and style of image. I did manage to shoot a lightly different shoot with a gown, see my previous post here, but what I really wanted was something that would be so different and so unusual as to be shocking.

So I came up with Corpse Bride, my own version not Tim Burtons – but there was a thought process behind this. I have access to a disused army base, it’s pretty run down, but it does have some pretty good shooting spaces. So my idea has this pretty girl in a wedding dress playing the violin in a derelict army base – but why is she there? She is actually a ghost and she is pining for her husband that was lost at war. He was stationed at the army base but on the eve of their wedding he was killed in action.

The bride, who (when she was alive) was a violinist and she has come back to the now derelict base to wait for her husband to return, but is destined to play the violin forever as a lost soul.

To turn that idea into reality I needed a fantastic model, a violin, and the skills of a SFX Make Up Artist (MUA).

After several months of planning and some set backs along the way, I secured one of my favourite models to work with, Lorena, a Spanish model who had the look, the hair and the confidence to pull this off. Our MUA for the day was Jodi, an excellent SFX MUA from Bristol.

Applying the SFX makeup to Lorena took more than four hours, four hours which she was sat on the second floor of an abandoned building, facing a hole in the wall (for light) and in the bitter cold

Lorena braving the cold to have her SFX make up applied by Jodi

As is usually the case with the English weather at this time of year, it started to rain and the skies got duller and greyer as the rain got harder. My carefully laid plans for the shoot were blown away as by the time the makeup had finished it was terribly dark outside and lashing down with rain.

Time to improvise.

Lorena towering menacingly over the photographer

Looking more menacing on the stairs

That’s not real blood in the background – honest!

 

Cowering in the corner

We had to curtail the shoot somewhat, it was deathly cold, the wind was blistering through the building and Lorena was covered in goosebumps. But we did one last shot, and with just a little bit of Photoshop magic it turned into this:-

Thunder & lightening, very very frightening !!

A little postscript to this story – Lorena decided to drive home still wearing the makeup, driving through Bristol city centre her car hit the red (on the petrol tank) and she did not have enough to get home – so she calmly drove to the nearest Shell Garage and filled up – still looking half dead!  🙂

best – Colin

 

 

 

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