PHOTOSHOOT: The Black Widow

shawke
May 13, 2015
2 min read

Sometime my job takes me to the darndest places... including the top of a 100-year-old clock tower.

For an upcoming Fashion Show fundraiser, a number of artists and designers in the community have come up with some wonderfully theatrical pieces. Each artist works with a model to create a piece for the runway, but first each one had a featured photoshoot. I was honoured to be asked by designer Ninette Gyorody to be her phorographer for her piece The Black Widow.

For her arachnid themed piece, we thought what better place than amongst the cobwebs of our 70ft tall clocktower as part of the Sir Sam Steele Building. This project became a challenge of mostly figuring out how to get photography gear and custom outfit up a series of 100 year old wooden ladders. Not for the vertigo-suffering, that's for sure.

Once we made it up to the clock face, the stage was set beautifully. Save for sweeping up a few hundred dead flies, very little alterations were needed for the aging backdrop. The daylight shone through the clock faces with a nice soft glow allowing to just use fill lights for any shadows.

We learned quickly though, how warm a clock tower can become in the sun and worked quickly to get the variety of shots we needed. I had instructions from the organizer of the Fashion Show to try and get a diverse number of shots of the outfit, highlighting different details that may not be seen by the audience when it goes down the runway. These images will be broadcast onto the wall behind them as the models walk the run way.

I feel like we did a fairly good job in a crammed space in creating the perfect home for the Black Widow.