It’s been a little while since I last posted. I’ve had a busy past month, but I’ve had a couple of days free before I have to head out of Shanghai to shoot a car factory outside of Shanghai. That’s actually a video job.
The previous weeks have been crazy busy for me, which is usual for this time of year, only this time it was a bit more extreme. I normally have a lot to do during this time, but this time I shot almost every day for US Vogue, worked a couple of days for WWD including covering the launch of a new collection by Dior, shot for a market research company for the jewellery industry and spend three nights covering an event for Tiffany & Co.
The work for Vogue was street style photography. I also shot one day of that (in the rain) for WWD. I’ll get to the street style stuff a bit later, once the WWD story has run. In the mean time, I’ll write a little bit on shooting the Dior show.
The debut of the Dior pre-fall 2021 collection was a huge event held in Shanghai’s Long Museum, a huge Bauhaus-inspired concrete building in the West Bund art district. There were 75 new outfits, a thousand guests, some big name Chinese celebrities and two live music performances. Usually I’d be one of two photographers covering an event of this scale for WWD. I suppose they’re trying to save some money.
What it meant for me was a mammoth editing job. First off, I had to shoot the first looks backstage. I had about an hour and half for that and did my edit in the two hours before the guests started to arrive. The bulk of my photos were of the looks on the runway. I’d had a bit of practice shooting all the looks for Fendi the previous month, but this show had three times the number of outfits.
To put things in perspective, I needed good, clear shots of each look on the runway, which is always the case when I shoot a new collection for WWD. As usually for this kind of show, it was a long runway, so I’d photograph each model maybe ten times or more as they approached the first turn. That’s at least 750 photos right there. Then I had to do it all again in one long line on the final walk. I’ll look to shoot a wider shot of that and also look to get more good shots of individual looks again in case I get a better one than on the fist time around. So now we’re maybe up to 1,500 photos, probably more. That night I also needed to shoot general coverage of the party, as many of the main celebrities as possible and the two performances by Hong Kong singer Joey Yung and Beijing hard rock band Black Panther. I was also able to enjoy some champagne and canapés while I was at it. It was nice that I knew a lot of the other expatriate photographers covering the event.
Once the party started to die down, I needed to sit down and edit. I sent it all off at around 3am as workers dismantled the partitions of the temporary office I was working in. Then I edited the street style I’d shot earlier that day for Vogue.
I had the cover of the WWD digital daily the next day and several web galleries. You can check out a couple of them here:
https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/dior-shanghai-prefall-2021-joey-yung-black-panther-1234799034/
https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/gallery/diors-prefall-2021-afterparty-in-shanghai-1234799825/
For something different, I also shot a roll of film backstage at Dior on Leica M3 a friend lent me. The Leica M3 was released in 1954 and is a legendary camera. This one was an early ‘double-stroke’ model, that needs two movements of the winder after each shot. It came with a 50mm ‘Summicron’ lens, first released two years after the M3. Both camera and lens are in great condition. I loaded it with a roll of Fujifilm Natura 1600 film, which another friend gave me.
I had shot a few rolls of this film before, but they stopped making it a couple of years ago. You can still in buy it online, but the prices are ridiculous. A quick search found a single roll for US$79. It’s about half that elsewhere online if you buy it in a pack of ten, which is still crazy. It used to sell for about $15 per roll. I have one more of these in my freezer. I’ll have to shoot it soon as these high speed films degrade faster than other types due to background radiation. The film itself, as you’d expect, is quite grainy. There’s a world of difference between the look of these shots and the ones on the two Nikon DSLRs I was shooting that night, but since the clothes and make-up has a retro disco aesthetic I thought this grainy film suited the subject. The M3 doesn’t have a light meter, so I just set the metered off my Nikons. Natura likes light so I overexposed my shots a little whenever I had enough light.
Since I had an hour and half to cover backstage and first look, I could shoot wit the M3 at a fairly leisurely pace. My other cameras were a Nikon D850 with a 50mm 1.8G lens and a Nikon D750 with a 28mm 1.4G lens. The 28mm lens was actually also lent to me by a friend and ended up being just right for some of the shots. I’d normally pick a 35 as my main backstage lens, but I found myself with my back to a partition at the top of a staircase and needed the width of the 28 to get the full length shot of the model and the disco set behind her for the shot that ended up on the cover. The runway show was covered with my D850 and 70-200 2.8 VR on a monopod. The monopod is necessary. If you try shooting a show like this with a camera and lens this heavy without a monopod, pretty soon your arm will feel like it’s going to drop off. The whole show lasted about 20 minutes.
As for the M3, I like it a lot. It’s such an incredibly well made camera that many of them have outlived their first owners. It has nice quiet little shutter sound due to cloth curtains behind the shutter and it’s a beautiful object in itself. I’m looking forward to shooting a little more with it before it gets returned to its owner who has a couple of my Nikon point and shoots to play with. One characteristic of that nice Summicron lens is that it’s not very contrasty. I’ve upped the contrast in the Natura shots in Lightroom. I thought 26 or the 38 or so shots were okay, so I think that’s a pretty good return. Anyway, here’s a gallery nine shots from that roll.
