After I had already finished all my work with Matt for this project, I was given an opportunity to also shoot with Lauren Lawlor on the last day of the Saturday supplement shoots schedule, which I happily accepted. I had previously worked with Lauren during the Cambridge away weekend and I knew we make a great team. Her idea is to shoot still life photography, more specifically flowers, both real and fake and to use food colouring in the water of the vases. She showed me her research and she has gone through all the options they've been given, but has chosen still life, because it is something she has never done before. I think her idea is great and even though I don't have any experience in this kind of photography either, I am pretty sure that we can create the vision that she has. 

For the reason that I was assigned to her late, she has already booked all the equipment herself, two lights, lighting stands, attachments and backdrop stands. We will be using a backdrop and possibly gels from the cupboard in Room 213. The camera, lenses, tethering cable and tripod are already provided. We have to create 9 different photos for this supplement, which we will using different flowers, different colours of the water and the background and different compositions. Below are her ideas for each shot. 

In order to prepare for this photo shoot I looked into some tutorials on Youtube to get a better understanding of taking these kinds of images. Once again, I referred to the fstoppers channel, I looked at their 'Critique the community - product photography' episode. There was only a single flower photo, where the flower wasn't even the main focus of the shot, but I still learned everything I needed. They go through every photo and analyse it, talk about the lighting, post-processing and most importantly what is lacking in a particular composition. Less is usually more in this case and if you are going to do any complex photo editing you best be good at it, because everything subpar is easily noticeable. I also looked at Lauren's behance page, to better understand her workflow. After this I looked at Peter McKinnon's product photography video, I remembered that he used to a lot of product shots of decks of cards before. He talks about breaking down your project into three aspects - themes, textures and props. Our theme for Lauren's project is to make these flowers look alive, the texture is the texture of the flowers and the props would be the colours and the way that we combine them. We also looked at the Adobe Colour Wheel online to create complementing colour combinations. 

After the shoot: I arrived around half nine on Friday for our shoot. Lauren already had all the equipment, we just had to put the one light in the big octa, the background light was setup already, batteries charged. I put the batteries in the phase and put it on the tripod. We had to use my laptop, because Lauren had an issue with hers, which was fine we talked about it the day before. She had already set up the backdrop and had the gels ready for the shoot, when we need them. For the first shots we used the green colouring and one of the pink flowers. The first half of our shooting time, went slower and was somewhat less successful, we were experimenting with the lights and the compositions, portrait and landscape, but at some point we started getting what she wanted and the results were amazing. She had four different vases, we filled them and put different colours in them - blue, purple, red and yellow. We cut and separated the flowers for each vase and we used a green, red and yellow gel for the background light. We switched to the 120mm macro lens, which was perfect for this type of photography. All of the shots looked different, the lighting was good and until the end of the shoot we experimented and had a good time. For me it was an absolute pleasure to work with her, things went very smooth and I am confident I did a good job as an assistant, which was perhaps due to my work with Matt before.