Peter Cripps Photography

This weekend I photographed some promotional images for an upcoming fashion shoot being organised by Zimbabwe Fashion Showcase (ZFS). ZFS is a collaboration between a group of designers and culture vultures that came together out of a shared passion for all things Zimbabwean. Chiedza Dawn Ziyambe, one of the founders of ZFS, organised the shoot and is also organising the second annual ZFS fashion show this coming July.

This was a day long shoot and involved five models, a makeup artist, stylist, designer, creative director, videographer and African male dance and music group – so quite a crowd. As you might expect, there were a few hundred images that came out of this shoot which I am still editing.

I also wanted to use the shoot to try out the Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4 which I hired from the ever excellent and friendly guys at The Flash Centre in Birmingham. If you’ve not been to one of these stores before (they also have one in Leeds and London) I recommend you do so. They have a vast array of gear to buy and hire and the staff are all super helpful. If you plan to go to The Photography Show on March 19th – 22nd you can also visit them there where they have lots of equipment on display as well as some good offers on on kit to buy.

I hired two RX 4’s with stands and 60cm x 60cm soft boxes together with the Elinchrom 130cm x 50cm Rotalux Strip. The kit performed flawlessly for the whole day and I got some great images out of it. Here are some black and white portraits I did of the models. All lit with an RX4 with small softball, overhead and pointing down at the model with a reflector at waist level to reflect some light back up.

Expect to see more images and some commentary from this shoot in some future posts over the next week or so. The full crew were:

• Chiedza Dawn Ziyambe – Designer and ZFS Founder
• Miri E.V. Ogunmuyiwa – Makeup Artist
• Sindiso Muhlwa – Creative Director
• Dan Lowenstein – Videographer

The studio for this shoot was SS Creative Photography in Birmingham.