I was asked to shoot a campaign for Converse to showcase their Jack Purcell sneaker. The brief was ‘a day in the life’ style, pretty much following around fashion guru Sam Levi on his day to day activities wearing the shoes. The client also wanted a minimal, candid, informal style to the photos and cropped to a square so it would fit in with Sam’s Instagram following (he’s a popular, and very nice, dude). I asked Sam to bring a bag with a few changes of clothes, maybe 3 tops, 3 pairs of pants, and of course the shoes would be the Jack Purcells and we could get the shoot out the way in a couple of hours.

This kind of shoot is really refreshing compared to my normal stuff with the big lights, the venues, the styling etc etc. This was literally walking around taking pictures, if something looked cool or jumped out, we’d talk about it and use it in the shoot. I wanted a few different backgrounds in this to showcase the versatility of the shoes how they can be worn in any occasion and still look great and fit in.

Setup was minimal too, 1 camera, 1 lens, 2 batteries. All good.

 

 

I didn’t want to just spam the client with pictures of shoes… of course the shoes are important but the lifestyle they represent is more so, and it also means I don’t have to just shoot a guy’s feet for 3 hours. The focus for me was on strong shapes and lines in an image. If you look at the ones posted here there’s a lot of linework going on which hopefully keeps things interesting and adds some dynamism to the shots.

Since it’s Instagram-inspired I wanted a vintage (dare I say ‘film’) look to the images, which was achieved by manipulating the curves panel in Lightroom (or Photoshop). There isn’t really one ‘recipe’ which works as what works on one image won’t work on another but the starting points were raising the black point, lowering the white point, adding a bit of grain, cropping to a square, and then manipulating the red and blue curves to tone the highlights and shadows. Every now and then I would use the main RBG curve to lower the brightness and give a bit of an underexposed look like you can see where Sam is walking down the steps. Cool stuff.

So overall, a minimal shoot but by no means less difficult than others. The vibe and feel was the most important thing, and for me it wasn’t so much about crystal clear sharpness and removing shadows in an image, but about representing the lifestyle of a vital young dude. Cheers.