corwinprescott

London Andrews in Iceland

Added 2015-10-30 22:13:41 +0000 UTC

For three years now I have been lucky enough to get the chance to work for one of my favorite models and very good friends London Andrews shooting her yearly calendar. In 2014 we shot in the set that would eventually become the series Temperance, in 2015 we shot in nature all around her home in Rochester, and for this year we wanted to do something really special. Originally we were planning on flying down to Puerto Rico and doing the calendar, but since I was already going to Iceland I suggested she just meet Nicole and I there. She was reluctant at first, but after a few google links to possible locations she was sold.

The challenge when shooting a calendar for someone else is that I have to work a lot more to make the subject the main focus of the image. After all while people will love the work that we are doing if London was anonymous or very tiny in all of the photos her fans would probably be a little disappointed, so I have to take my style and tweak it a little bit. Draw the eye to the subject, and make them as important as the landscape. It was actually very fun traveling with two models and shooting them in the same places but very differently. I would switch back and forth as I got ideas or found the perfect spot for a specific type of shot.

I didn't want to just go around and take the same photo for both of them. That would be boring for me, boring for them, and definitely boring for you.

To create these images I used my 17-40mm F4 and my 70-200mm F2.8 almost exclusively. The intensity of the weather and landscape made it pretty important that I use my more versatile lenses. Trying to switch over to my 85mm F1.4 would have probably meant killing at least one camera body on this trip with water, wind, or sand, and possibly myself while trying to move my body over incredibly dangerous terrain to compose. Also while I love the look of the 85mm F1.4 in forests where the extremely low depth of field can be used to direct the eye, there really weren't many trees in all of Iceland, and definitely not on the southern side of the island where London and I did all of our shooting, so in this instance I was incredibly glad to have the zooms in my camera bag.

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