week9 Freddie Helwig

Today we had guest speaker Frederike Helwig come in and talk about her photography, she is a Fashion Photographer living in London and has done a lot of work for ID, Dazed & Confused and Vogue and many more.

I have never tried fashion photography and in some ways I feel slightly intimidated by it, even though I felt this way I went to this lecture with an open mind hoping to learn something new. That is exactly what happened. Frederike’s photography has a very distinctive and almost raw style, she uses a flash unit that fixes to the top of the camera and simply points and shoots, this creates an almost 2D ‘pop’ effect, she likes to include a sense of humour within her work asking her models to do outrageous poses.

One of the best tips she gave about how she came to discover her style was to just take lots of photos and pick one that is the best and shoot again in that style, then pick another few and so on, this seems fairly simple and obvious but makes so much sense, with this technique, over the years she was able to define her style.

She talked about this image, it is of actor Adam Brody, she decided to use a dog as a prop for this series which works really well as it gives the images added interest, she shot all her images on one street and asked Adam to do various poses, for this particular image, the dog was yawning so she quickly asked Adam to yawn too.

she told us that she always improvises and tends to come up with ideas for the shoot on the day. Before the presentation I had preconceived views on fashion photography, mainly that the photographers are a bit ‘stuck up’ but Frederike seems really down to earth and she brings an element of fun to her style. She has definitely changed my opinion.