Creating the Photograph

Creating the Photograph: Aashith Shetty’s “Let It Snow”

Chris Gampat
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03/05/2016
2 Mins read

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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

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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

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The Shoot

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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

Before
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After
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Aashith Shetty fashion lighting
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.