Creating the Photograph is an original series where photographers teach you about how they concepted an image, shot it, and edited it. The series has a heavy emphasis on teaching readers how to light. Want to be featured? Email chrisgampat[at]thephoblographer[dot]com.
Aashith Shetty is a fashion advertising photographer based out of India. Self taught for the first few years, he came upon David Hobby’s blog which changed the way he looked at light. “After which I assisted Martin Prihoda and Tarunn Solanki for a short while.” he tells the Phoblographer.
I found Aashith on Behance, and fell in love with the fact that his work is very much about embracing the idea of a fashion shoot as a full production. It takes creative ingenuity, and a lot of planning. So when he had to deliver a snow scene for a client, he got right to work.
The Concept
Originally the client wanted us to shoot this look book like it was in a snow globe for their winter release, but we realized it would’ve gotten rather monotonous to shoot 8-10 looks; so we started to explore other ideas. We eventually got to wanting to make it look like a street with a reference that the client shared except we didn’t have the budget to shoot it out doors and it doesn’t snow it the south of India…at all.
The Gear
- Canon 6D
- Canon 24-70mm
- Elinchrom Master RX
- Elinchrom FXR 400
- A smoke machine
- A snow machine
The Shoot
We had to buy a used snow machine from across the country as they’re not very easily available in India. While testing the machine we realized it was a foam that dissolved into a liquid as it hit the floor. So on shoot day we brought in two large bags of sea salt to give the illusion of rested snow.
Well, to start off the lighting we had a gridded soft box high on the model’s right and a key on a boom stand and we had a 10 x 10 scrim behind the soft box. Then we had a beauty dish shooting through it for a fill and we had another skimmer on the model’s left with a beauty dish bouncing off it just to make sure we didn’t drop off all the way to black. There was another strobe to the back with a cooling gel on it to set the evening mood. The key was measured to f4 as anything higher would dull out the light coming of the prop lamp we had in frame. The snow machine was set just next to gridded soft box and then we threw a smoke machine to make the background seem a little less like a studio.
Post Production
Post was fairly simple actually–just some frequency separation for the skin and some DnB to make the image pop a bit.
Before/After

