Behind the Scenes: Prepping for the Photo Shoot

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.

Just getting started.

An hour later.

Over 60 shirts!

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.

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Behind the Scenes: Ch-ch-ch-changes for the Photo Shoot

Karin says…

Our direct-to-garment printing process means I needed to order shirts specifically for each model, and they’d have to be printed in between choosing the models and the photo shoot. It was agonizing trying to get more details about the models’ sizes–I had bits and pieces of information, but not the same info on each person, and not enough to really know what sizes to order.

I ended up ordering two sizes for each model. That was over 60 shirts! We couldn’t get them printed in time, so we moved the photo shoot out a month.

Uh oh! When we rescheduled, we found out that Adrian was leaving to study abroad and wouldn’t be available for the shoot. He had such a nice personality in the few minutes we saw him, and a beautiful smile, so we were sorry that he wouldn’t be able to work with us.

The next guy we picked wasn’t available.

The guy after that wasn’t available.

We couldn’t pick anyone too short, because Sixto is 6′ 4″ and we didn’t want a shorter guy to look out of balance. So now we’re constrained by the timing of the photo shoot, by the model’s height, and by whether he’ll fit into the shirts that have already been printed. No pressure!

Finally, we found Julio, who looked great. And he was available.

Ariel has already put in hours on this project, and all we’ve done is the casting. She’s a pro.

Behind the Scenes: Choosing Models

Karin says…

So here they are, our beautiful models!

They were asked to do three poses. In the first, they held a paper number that identified them and gave us a big smile.

In the second, Ariel asked them to do something quirky. Sixto, second from the right, repeated “Quirky?” in his Spanish accent (ladies, you will love it–I’m going to ask the models if they’ll answer some questions on my iPhone so, if he agrees, you can all hear it), and Ariel clarified for him. Adrian, on the far right, brought glasses to the shoot as a prop. We loved that!

In the third photo, they could do whatever they wanted. There was always a moment of hesitation before they (sing it with me) struck a pose. Oh, can you tell which pose this is? This is everyone’s quirky pose.

From left to right, meet Vicki, Heather, Sixto, and Adrian. You four have gorgeous smiles!

The only one I didn’t see at the casting call is Vicki, so I’ll be meeting her for the first time at the photo shoot. Can’t wait!