London Fashion Weekend

Today, courtesy of Canon UK, I was able to photograph London Fashion Weekend catwalk shows from the photographers' pit. This was a whole new experience for me. 

I don't normally do portrait photography, and I have no knowledge of the fashion industry, so this was a totally new style of photography for me.  In addition, I have never photographed from a "photographers' pit" before, where 30 photographers are crushed together in a small allocated space, all struggling to get good angles.  It was great fun!

I had some difficulty choosing a blip from the hundreds of photographs I took.  However, I decided to use this one, which shows the audience taking hundreds more photographs, almost exclusively on their mobile phones.

I nearly used a different photograph, showing a model experiencing a "wardrobe malfunction", but was concerned that this might give offence.  If you want to see it, and won't take offence, you can view my Flickr album here.

If you are interested in current fashion trends and want a feel for current styles, you can see a more complete collection of my images in another Flickr album here.

I came to the conclusion that a key accessory for this Autumn/Winter is a role of black plastic electrical insulating tape. You can perhaps see it in use by the model on the left of the group in this picture, particularly if you view it full screen..  It becomes more obvious in my Flickr albums.

For those interested, the Canon representatives suggested using manual exposure, a shutter speed of not less than 1/500th (because the models were moving quite quickly), an aperture of around f/5.6 to give sufficient depth of field while keeping the background slightly soft, and an appropriate ISO for the light levels (I generally used between 1000 and 2000 when the full lights were on).  I set the colour temperature to 3400K as recommended and the camera was set to focus continually (AI Servo on my Canon).