The Andy Aupperlee Explosion 5000

Seattle based designer and entrepreneur Stephanie de Villa contacted me earlier this year about doing some photography for her baby onesie line, baby deVILLE. After talking about some creative ideas and quickly Googling “onesie,” I put the full resources of Explosion 5000 Photo, LLC into the project. Earlier this month Stephanie launched the baby deVILLE website, featuring photography by yours truly.

There were three main deliverables for this job, two of which included talent (aka babies). For the first setup, I placed a mildly reflective white board on the ground on photographed individual babies lying on their backs. The purpose of this shot was to clearly show off the design while being worn by the baby. To get the angle I needed, I climbed up a ladder and shot from overhead. I was very fortunate to work with great parents who worked tireslly on getting their children to smile and look-up. All I had to do was hang out 8 feet in the air and blast off frames. I exclusively used the Nikon D300 and Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. I lit the babies with a large softbox overhead and off to the side, yet just inches away to get very soft light. Several feet behind their hid I used a beauty dish to provide a little fill and keep the top of their skulls from getting shadowy.

The next setup involved the talent against a white seamless. I blasted the 9 foot roll of white seamless with two Calumet 750 Travelites, and lit the babies with a 500ws Bowens Gemini through a large softbox. The individual shots were pretty easy, but the group shot proved to be a little tougher. It’s tricky enough to get one baby to do what you need him to do—multiply that by four and you have a totally different animal. Again, the parents really saved my ass here and gave their children great direction while I ripped off frames as quickly as my lights would recycle (about 1 every second).

So as not to subject the babies to needless blasts of 2000 watt-seconds, I used a weirdly shaped doll as a lighting stand-in. We actually found the doll at the location and it worked out well. Evan climbed onto the set to monkey around with the doll at one point, and I grabbed this slightly bizarre looking outtake.

I shot the entire session tethered to a MacBook Pro and previewing the images in Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta. Since Lightroom does not yet support tethering for the D300, I used a nifty little program called Sofortbild to grab the files from my camera. I then setup Lightroom to auto import any images captured by Sofortbild. This setup worked great as it allowed Stephanie, her assistant and the parents to see what kind of images I was capturing. It made the whole photoshoot a much more interactive experience, which ultimately benefits the quality of the final finished product.

The final deliverable was to shoot every design/color combination of the onesies alone on a hanger. I used the same white seamless setup and hung the clothing from a lightweight boom. About a week later, I photographed a bare hanger at Studio 806 against white. To get the final image, I removed the boom from the product shots and composited the hook part of the bare hanger into everyone one of the design/color combinations. The end result is a hanging onesie that doesn’t seem to be hanging from anything.

As you might imagine, the logistics of coordinating 5 babies, many wardrobe changes and multiple setups can create a hectic environment. Much of the success of this photoshoot comes from having a client with a clear vision and parents who worked tirelessly to make their babies cute. Since I was able to focus on the technical and creative aspects of the shoot, it allowed us to work quickly and avoid any major baby-disasters. I wish Stephanie the best of luck with baby deVILLE—if you have a little one at home, I highly recommend you check out her site and order some new threads for your critter.

For a look at everything we shot, check out my Flickr set or view the slideshow. Stephanie also has some behind-the-scenes photos on the baby deVILLE site.