In 2009 the Camera Club I belong to ran a regional conference where the main speaker and workshop sessions were on “trash the dress” which was an American concept of shooting a bride where you didn’t worry about the dress. In preparing for this the club bought a large number of dresses on Trade Me, and since that event they had sat in bags at a former club member’s house.

In late November she contacted current members and asked that we collect them or else they were going to the tip. As no one else wanted them I offered to give them a home. It made quite a sight having 13 dresses airing in the line.

Brittany (styled by Zaria and makeup by Matty)

I contacted Donna from Voda Model Management to see if we could arrange to use them in a shoot and she suggested that we could do something with them. Furthermore she said that Zaria Portion (Ghost Train Design) could use the material and stylise a shoot.

This was all arranged to happen in the week after Christmas, and in the end it turned out to be a large scale event with three photographers, two makeup artists, one stylist and four models.

Because of peoples availability the models were made up one after another so all photographers shot the same model at the same time. It was quite interesting to see how different people would use the same model and location but come up with different concepts.

The shoot had originally been planned to take part at Kaitoke Regional park which is just north of Upper Hutt. It gave us a great variety of locations including some small streams that would enable to dresses to out in water while ensuring that the model was safe.

Unfortunately for us this park is very popular and the weather between Christmas and New Year was stunning resulting in the park being very crowded. After both Donna and I visited the park on the two days before the shoot it became obvious that it would be practically impossible to actually shoot there. So at the last minute the shoot was changed to Percy’s Reserve in Lower Hutt.

This location still gave us a number of different environments, however it lacked the running water that I was looking for. Brittany did agree to go into a small stream at the back of the duck pond. We have a number of great photos of her expression as she waded through the mud to get to the position we wanted.

For the final image I wanted something quite different and so the whole crew moved down to the Hutt River, so that Jess could get into it. By the time we got to this shot it was around 6:00pm but the sun was still very bright in the sky.

I had fun on the day, but every time I shoot outside it makes me appreciate how much easier it is to shoot in the studio.