Karin says…
Don’t ask me why I didn’t just ask Ariel what I should do to prep. Instead, I imagined what we’d need, and then I’d email her with each question as I thought of it: what will people eat, and when? How can I prep the shirts and get them to the shoot without wrinkling them? What if the shirts don’t fit right? What if someone doesn’t show up? Can we get the models’ weight and chest measurements?
Patient Ariel!
Following Ariel’s suggestions, I ordered a sandwich tray and vegetables with dip, and planned to bring fruit, pretzels, and water the day of the shoot. I gathered as much info as I could about the models, and made a guess on sizes. We got our rolling rack out of storage, and I assembled it in Ariel’s studio.
We also had a clothing steamer that we’d never used, but it turned out to be simple to set it up, too. We had plenty of hangers that we’d accumulated while we were learning to print.
Over a couple of days, I steamed over 80 shirts. working a few hours per day. Don’t these photos look just like a stop-motion movie? No? Darn.
These are all the printed shirts. Then I realized we also needed to photograph blanks. We’re thinking we might use the blanks to spoof product shots when we have new shirts but won’t have another photo shoot for awhile.
Back to the steamer for more!
I had a master list showing each model and which shirts they’d be wearing. I used that to put each person’s shirts together with a label so they could keep track of them.
Ha–we’ll see how well that went when I finish this story.