Harper’s Bazaar Arabia-Louis Vuitton from Melissa Rodwell on Vimeo

It’s such an incredible feeling when you really click with an art director or a fashion editor. It’s a rush, in fact. And that’s the way it feels when I work for Sally from Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. I am always excited for another opportunity to work with her again, we just have a mutual love for fashion and we are on the same page, aesthically! So when I got her email back in July about this men’s shoot, I was thrilled! There was about a 3 week lead in before she actually landed in LA so the first thing we started doing was looking for the perfect model and since we were also shooting the cover, the casting was very important!

There was a decent amount of prep work that went into this shoot and I’ll explain this to you now. While we were scouring LA for the perfect model, I set out to search the perfect location for the shoot. Sally wanted something very “LA”, you know, sunny, and glossy and hip! But Harper’s was also doing this story to coincide with the Louis Vuitton Trophy, the sailing race set to take place in Dubai from November 12th through the 27th! And because the shoot was with Louis Vuitton clothing exclusively, their people had some input too and they wanted a nautical theme sort of enter-twined with the story to enhance the Trophy race. So I first reached out to rowing clubs or considered renting an actual rowing boat. We realized that since we had to get 6 pages and a cover in one day, maybe the rowing boat would be too limiting. I reached out to some Yacht clubs too, but there weren’t any that were really aesthetically interesting to shoot in Southern California. That’s when I thought of a pool located in the Hollywood Hills that I had shot at about 2 months before this shoot came up. Situated high above Hollywood Boulevard, this house had all the glamour of Hollywood and then some! It was modern, sleek and bright. But the main star of the house is it’s pool. Beautifully “poised” in the front yard, the pool looks out over the city of Los Angeles with lots of white concrete surrounding it and tons of shooting opportunities. I forwarded Sally some outtakes of the pool from my previous shoot and she approved the location. So the location was nailed down first. The casting took a bit longer. I emailed the top LA modeling agencies and gave them the job break down and started forwarding the packages once I got them to Sally in Dubai. We went back and forth for awhile until her and her staff decided that Dylan Griner from Photogenics Models was our “it” model for this shoot. With his “rugged” but still beautiful looks, he was the perfect model for this kind of shoot.

From: http://www.fashionphotographyblog.com