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March 15, 1998 Spring Fashion; the printed page
Our second choice - the one used in the opening spread, was also very pretty. Perhaps it was too pretty for the cover. As one of our magazine columnists said, the garden gate picture is a fashion photo; the other picture could just be a portrait of a pretty girl. That hard-to-define narrative wasn't as strong.
The slinky purple dress was the most fashionable image and it did run a full page inside. But the dress is one that could only be worn by young women with very thin bodies. There is a feeling that the women who read our magazine are more conservative so that dress on the cover would turn them away. Personally, I disagree. I think everyone would be interested in clothes that are so distinctive that they border on being costumes. But hey, they think the mythical suburban housewife wants something more practical. The studio photos of sports-themed styles were never considered strongly for the cover because it was the secondary story. And for me, the clothes weren't so distinctive that the photos could make a grabber cover.
Now that it's been printed, the issue seems to be successful. The magazine editors have already said how much they like it. The good news is that we survived it and it will be another six months or so before we have to plan another fashion marathon. And because I've been too sketchy on the details, here are some tech notes; The photos in the secondary story were all made in the photo studio, using multiple strobe lighting. I avoided using soft boxes to diffuse the light because I wanted a crisper look. Instead, I used direct reflectors with a single layer of frosted diffusion gel. The garden location utilized morning sunlight. The one exception - which was against all the rules - was the slinky purple dress. It's one of the few lovely pictures I've shot at high noon. I used a reflector panel for the location photos - one side white and the other silver - to reflect light into dark areas and thereby brighten the shadows. Both locations were photographed using a Hasselblad medium format camera. The film is larger than the 35mm we use for most assignments and it allows us to run a photo full page, or even across two pages, without losing image quality. I used Fuji Provia 100 ASA slide film which provides excellent color saturation and sharpness. When I can, I use this camera/film combination for magazine assignments because the cheap newsprint we print on sucks all the life out of a picture. The more I can put into the image on the front end, the better it survives on the page. Tom Burton
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Tom
Burton
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Contributor
since 1998
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Behind
the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism |
