To develop my work, my latest project “Royalty” aims to celebrate women of colour and their heritage. I chose to partner with Amira Suleman as her sustainable materials that have been sourced from her father’s home in Africa, inspired me to educate myself on environmental destruction in other countries rather than just my own home town.
To create this image, I used a flash speed lite which creates a harsher contrasting flash with a tight shadow, I positioned my models close to the background to maintain the shadows outline and lowered my shutter speed to catch a subtle blur from their continuous movement. This gave my image a catwalk appearance and caught my models off-guard for a natural and candid look.
I am captivated in showing off intricate details of outfits with close up shots, in the image above I used my composition skills to create symmetry within the image and highlighted the corseted back as the main focus, by reflecting the navy colour back with opera gloves in my styling. The ‘princess’ dress style with its large hoop skirt inspired me to create a version of royalty that isn’t whitewashed and instead celebrates the landscape and materials of Africa, the designer's creations feature wood, intricate embellishments and raffia yarn made from palm trees.
