My Short Stint As A Fashion Photographer

          My sister Nancy, is a well-known and a published author of many knitting books.  She had struggled with publishers over the content and design of some of those books.

    In 2012, she had the items and ideas for another book, and this time, she decided she would try to do the publishing herself.  That would give her more control and freedom over the final product.  In our family we did have a nephew and niece who had done modeling, in fact our nephew Jacy was a professional model at the time.

         So Nancy, who lives in Holland, traveled back to Indiana to have Jacy and his sister Sadia model her knitted pieces, and use our uncle’s farm as a background.  Nancy asked me if I would take the photos, which seemed like it might be fun.  She hired a third model, Rachel (the blonde) and I traveled to Indiana to do “the shoot”. 

    We tried to impress Rachel, who had never done any modeling, with the fact that she was working with professional models, a photographer from Canada, and an art director from Amsterdam.  We did the shooting at my uncle’s farm, which had a wonderful photo backgrounds around every turn.  The project became a real family endeavor.

    We shot photos for a couple of hours on three different days.  I found it difficult to focus my attention on the scarves, with such beautiful faces in the viewfinder, but Nancy kept reminding me that the knitted pieces were why we were taking the pictures.  It was also frustrating working with my camera (actually its a Sony camcorder), every time I thought I had a good shot and pressed the shutter button, like most digital cameras, there was bit of a delay, so I had a number of shots with closed eyes, and strange facial expressions, but once we got to look at all the results, I was very happy with most of the photos and I thought  Nancy would have a difficult time picking out the photos she would to use from the 500 or so shots that I had taken.

    The actual shooting was great fun, and luckily it provided Nancy with some great results.  (I was very proud that the purple shirt Jacy wore was one of mine.  I hadn’t realized that I was such a trendy dresser) 

    Anyway in the end, all the fun we had and fine photos we had produced, came to nothing.  Nancy became so bogged down with trying to do all the work required to do the book herself, that she finally relented and had the publisher do it.  Sadly, the publisher used his own models and photographer.

    It was of course a disappointment that the “family” project wasn’t used, but I think we all had an enjoyable time pursuing the dream of the family fashion endeavor, and I was certainly left with some wonderful memories and photos.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca