Tag Archives: brian dowling

Diane von Furstenberg’s runway show at Bryant Park in New York City

I didn’t update for a long time and now I find myself updating twice in a day!

Diane von Furstenberg always has beautiful colors and the top models walking her shows.  Here is her Spring 2010 collection at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week held at Bryant Park in New York City.  Hopefully, there are a few runway fashion photographers out there reading this.  All my images were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II + Canon 300mm 2.8 IS at ISO 800, f/4-5.6, and at 1/400 of a second.  I did a little cropping, but that’s about it. 

A day with New York City fashion designer, Nary Manivong

First off, Happy New Years everyone!  Be sure to add me on Facebook, but if you do let me know you came from the blog. :]

Nary Manivong is an up and coming fashion designer and has been listed on the official NYC “Fashion Week” list for the past few season.  I met him at his show last February and being half Asian myself, I thought it would be a good personal project for myself to do a “Day in the life of a fashion designer” shoot with Nary Manivong while he presented his Spring 2010 collection.  He was very open to the idea and I decided to start my coverage of him at breakfast at his apartment in Brooklyn till the end of his showing  in the Meat Packing District of lower Manhattan.

The day starts in East Williamsburg Brooklyn, to his clothing factory in the Garment District of Manhattan (All of Nary’s clothes are made right in New York!), back to Brooklyn to pick up his brothers car to deliver his clothes to the shows location in lower Manhattan.

All photos were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and either a Canon 24-70L or Canon 85mm 1.8 Lens.

To see the rest of the photos, please visit  my slide show and Nary’s clothes are available at NaryManivong.com

Rebecca Taylor Spring 2010 w/ Marisa Miller

It seems a lot of celebrities know of Rebecca Taylor after Sarah Jessica Parker fell in love with the New Zealand designer.  Below is her Spring 2010 collection from her show in New York City.  Marisa Miller is in the last two photos and is most noted as being a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.  I’m usually not a celeb chaser, but she was really nice and her husband, Griffin Guess,  took a great in focus shot of us.  I normally don’t smile like that…lol

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[caption id="attachment_422" align="aligncenter" width="900" caption="Myself and Marisa Miller. I need to learn how to smile"]Myself and Marisa Miller. [/caption]

Wedding Dress Photo Manipulation

As the saying goes, you walk a mile step by step.  I’ve always wanted to play the piano, but haven’t had the patients to play daily to get better.   Maybe, if I started ten years ago I would know how to play chopsticks by now.   The same goes for Photoshop.  It’s a pretty daunting program, but if you don’t start sometime, you aren’t going to wake up one day and magically be a digital artist wizard.

With that in mind, I stayed home Friday night and researched a few things that drive me nuts in Photoshop.  That is basically how to cut an object out within an image and paste it onto another image.  People call this photo manipulation or at least, that’s what I call it.  So, thanks to a kind soul on YouTube, I was able to learn the wonders of the background-eraser tool.  For some reason, I turned the photo black & white on Friday.  That is the second photo listed.  Saturday, inbetween watching college football, I did a color version.  All in all, I probably spent about eight hours trying to figure things out, but now I have a new skill and hopefully I will improve over time.

The girl in the dress is my friend Amaris and we took some photos inside a wedding boutique in Chinatown called Ivy Bridal on 117th N 10th St in Philadelphia.  The has a hand painted muslin, but it was of some pink stairs.  So, I turned it backwards and shot on the plain gray side.  I also purposely shot the image about a full stop darker knowing I was going to try and cut the image out.  I really loved the dress and I think it was only $600 in the store.  The images of the grass and bird are from sxc.hu and I applied my custom coloring to the photo.   I think that’s about it.  Enjoy.

My Final Edit
My first attempt. The B&W was a little dark for me...
Images used for my rendering

Christian Siriano Spring 2010 at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in NYC

First off, congrats to the Phillies for pushing a Game 6 of the World Series!

Below are the photographs from the Christian Siriano show at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week at the Bryant Park Tents in New York City.  It seems just like yesterday that he was on Project Runway and then last season, Fall 2009 collection, he was showing at The Salon.  The Salon is the smallest of three tents at Bryant Park.  Fast forward six months latest and business and investors must be good because Christian was showing at The Promonade which is a venue two and a half to three times bigger(I’m guessing here) than The Salon.

I was front and center for this show and Christian chose to have a single model line on a very very wide gray-blue runway.  I would estimated they removed four rows of seats for the extra wide runway.  It looked like the ocean as you can see from his blues and wave inspired collection.  It reminded me of Leanne Marshall’s “wave inspired” collection from Season Five of Project Runway.  Anyways, Enjoy the photos.  For those that want to be a runway fashion photographer, all images were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, 300L 2.8 IS at ISO 400,  1/320,  f 4 and Kelvin was adjusted manually to maybe 3200?   The lighting was PERFECT.  All I did to these photos was +6 contrast + 6 Saturation and 20% unsharp mask in Photoshop. I would say about 75% of the shows I am shooting at ISO 800-1000, but ISO 400 makes me happy =]]

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