Dan Kennedy was the perfect photographer to host our first shoot. He’s a highly successful fashion, portrait and commercial photographer who’ a really positive, enthusiastic person with loads of energy and incredibly willing to share his skills and experience.

Dan said he’d be bringing some kit. At 9.30 he arrived with his assistant and enough kit to sink a ship. 8 trips up 6 flights of stairs on a Saturday morning with bags of kit was not in the schedule.

After a period of recovery we worked with Dan on the concepts for the day’s shoots. Or rather Dan knew exactly what he wanted and what would look good. He’s obviously used to managing every element of his shoots, including the people. 4 different looks were planned, 2 portrait and 2 fashion.

Dan began the day by telling his story of progressing from shooting waterlogged cows in Norfolk for a local newspaper to photographing models on the beach in Miami for major fashion labels.

Hopefully we can convince him to run another shoot soon.

A few insights from the shoot:

Dan obsessively meters his lighting, even ensuring the forehead and chin of a model are evenly metered. He used an orange gel to warm up the background and hair light in the first image.

Dan has a hand painted grey background. He sets this up to create portraits, as it gives more character and texture to the background as seen in the second image, which is lit with just one light.

The third image in this set uses just one bare light at approximately 4 meters from the model and background, very simple but punchy and effective.

Image by Andrew Storm

Image by Rebecca Davies

Hair – Michelle Maskall
Make up – Lara Himpelmann
Styling – Marina de Magalhaes

Blog post by Andrew Mason