Autumn Fairytale.

This is the last in my Seasons Fairytale series based off of Alphonse Mucha’s “The Seasons” paintings (be sure to check out Winter, Spring, & Summer). This was actually the trickiest one to put together just because Autumn in Texas lasts about a week, and it can come without warning. Sometimes it’s the first week of October, sometimes it’s on Christmas Eve. It was important to me that the shoot be right when the leaves change colors, which meant I needed my team ready to go with little notice. Unfortunately the leaves changed perfectly on the week of Thanksgiving, meaning that everyone was off to visit their families.

So instead I assembled a back-up team with a new model and make-up artist, and changed the theme to be witchier to match the model’s vibe. (I’ll have those photos available next week). Even though it was a fun shoot, the lighting and mood seemed too dark, and didn’t match the rest of the series, so I decided I wanted to try again one last time with my original model before all the leaves disappeared. We had a few days before the next freeze and all the leaves would fall, so it was quite a rush putting things together.

Megan McHugh is a wonderful model who I met at one of Erin’s Instameets. She has a beautifully delicate look, and is fantastic at posing, so I was very glad to work with her. Once again we used a dress from Free People. Due to time constraints we weren’t able to get florals from The Greenhouse 817 as planned, and our hair & make-up artist had to drop out last minute, but luckily Megan is a pro at doing her own. Altogether it made for a much more paired down photoshoot as compared to the others in the series.

Erin Summerlin was my photo assistant, helping with the reflector, spraying “Fog In A Can”, and dancing around with smoke bombs to create the atmosphere we were after. We started at one of my favorite secret spots, then made our way to the back trails at Wiggly Field. We finished off with the main photo I had envisioned, which involved torches. I used some good sized branches I gathered early that day, wrapped with canvas rags that were soaked in kerosene. We had a fire extinguisher standing by just in case. Shooting with torches looks so cool, but can be difficult because the lighting varies so much from second to second, really effecting the exposure and contrast ratio. Also we had to time it just right so the sun was setting in the distance, revealing a hint of the background, otherwise it would be so dark you wouldn’t see anything besides the torch and her face. We just minutes to spare, we got exactly the photo I wanted to finish off the series.