With the London Fashion Week been and gone, there was a less talked about but equally as good show called the London Fashion Weekend at Somerset House that happens a bit later on. This was the first time I have ever been to anything like London Fashion Weekend, fashion shows are not the sort of thing I usually attend, but this was too good an opportunity to miss! And this is why:
Over the last few years, I’ve gone to quite a lot of indoor events at quite a few venues and nearly all of them have one thing in common: VERY poor lighting and VERY poor when it comes to giving photographers the opportunity & access to get good shots. Usually there are no photographer tickets allowing you to get a bit closer, no way to get a press-pass unless you’re there working for a specific publication, and there’s usually insufficient lighting, leaving no other option but to go there as a normal person and hope for the best.
However, the London Fashion Weekend had it ALL right! First of all they offered a special Photographer ticket that allowed you to get into the photographers box right at the end of the catwalk, and in my case – smack down the middle of the catwalk!
Secondly, the lighting was pretty amazing, coming from sparsely lit rooms to a full blown professional catwalk set-up was an extremely nice change – and it certainly shows in the photos, no more high ISO to compensate for dim lights, no more need to use a flash, just bright, nicely lit photos.
Usually I’m not interested in Fashion – it’s not something that does anything for me, but I thought it would give me some practice shooting something different, after all, there’s only so many Motor shows & Motorsport events you can go to without getting bored of the same subject matter, and I really am glad that I took the opportunity to come to this and try something different.
Now of course this was still a little bit of a cheat, I didn’t have anything to do with lighting or the setup of any of the lighting you see in the photos. I was only really responsible for pointing the camera at the person walking towards me, making sure I had the right settings and pressing the shutter button. But there is still some skill in that, and it was definitely a situation I wouldn’t have been able to setup for myself (how much would the venue have costed alone!).
All in all I would like to congratulate the organisers of the London Fashion Weekend for doing such a great job to accommodate photographers, If only more event organisers would put on such a good event for photographers, after all they want the publicity as much as anything. Good work! Hopefully this is something they will repeat next year, and hopefully for many years beyond that.
Posted in: Photography