A couple of weeks ago – I can barely remember that far back, come to think of it – I had the chance to shoot with Carol, who goes by the handle of Crystal Grenade on ModelMayhem. The idea for the shoot was to produce something similar to this chanel ad featuring Audrey Tautou. Which basically meant shooting into some mirrors, which were locate in a dance studio at the college where Carol works. Here’s what we managed to produce:

All in all, not too shabby. So what did I learn from this experience? Well, a couple of things:

1. Bring your own mirror

If you’re ever planning a shoot that makes use of mirrors in the same way that we did, bring your own. Seriously. Whilst the mirrored dance studio that we were working in was by no means a terrible environment the mirrors were far wider than we needed, which meant that there was lots of post-processing needed to clear the reflected clutter out of the image. Also, the mirrors weren’t full-length (at least not for a 5′ 9″-ish woman in heels), so Carol had to spend a lot of time bending uncomfortably at the knees to avoid having a length of white cowling running through her head.

If I were planning this shoot again I’d get a very long mirror that was just wide enough to give us what we needed for the shot. I’d also like to shoot it in a studio environment so that I had better control of the background; our lives would have been made much, much easier if we’d been able to black flag the background, even if it would have ended up in a polyboard maze.

2. Bring a bottle of Windolene

If I had thruppence for every finger mark and smudge that I’ve removed from those mirrors in Photoshop over the last week I’d be richer by at least three Guineas. I could have avoided all that fuss with a bottle of windowlene, or some homemade window-cleaning fluid (I hear vinegar and water works well).

3. If you try to add a hair light you’ll drive yourself mad

This pretty much speaks for itself, right?

So, that’s one shoot’s editing down, three to go. And all that around the working week. This could be fun. And by “fun,” I mean “exhausting.”

Here’s a slideshow of the photos from the set for your edification.