We get on the road in the dark. We are going to a dam on Şile to shoot Lee Cooper’s FW’23 campaign. Set time is 5:00 a.m., so we sleep most of the way. We realize that we have arrived when the car rattles on the road. A sweet twilight smiles at us from behind the forest, we are on the way to Darlık Dam, but we can not reach the exact location because there are no phone signals, no GPS to follow. We go to find places where the phone picks up and check our way.
We are the second car to arrive at the set area, but still no signal here. We find a corner on a small hill with a signal and start calling our team. Everyone says they’re lost, GPS is leading them to dead ends. We watch the sunrise on that tiny hill until the whole team is here.
We started shooting late due to this setback. Caravans and other vehicles are quickly settling in the field, equipment is already out and about. Hair and make-up are starting to unfold on their tables in the caravan, styling has receded into its corner. Models are having a fast breakfast. Photographers and directors look at the location and lighting.
Our models Joanne and Alex go to hair and makeup. We want very light, naturally radiant make-up, and hair that is very natural. Our shooting story is a denim story revolving around the caravan. A young couple living in a caravan, near a beautiful stream, sometimes accompanied by grazing animals.
Just before photo shoot begins, a cow and her calves come close to us, we feed them with apples and oranges that we brought with us as props. As the calves move forward and start playing with the small puddles, they unknowingly move away from their mothers. When one of the calves, who cannot find their mother, turns around and calls out to her, the cow next to us takes one last look at the apples and follows her children, and starts wandering around near our shooting range.
We start shooting with Alex. Until Joanne’s hair and make-up are finished, we may take photograph of three outfits around the trailer with Alex, all of them with different pops, in different ways that capture the different inspirations of jeans in our daily life. When Joanne joins us, we start shooting our couple poses, we move around the dam, and each outfit finds its own location.
The weather is 30 degrees… The team is pouring water over their heads from the heat… The models are putting on an incredible performance in their winter clothes. At noon, we take a break both to avoid the heat and to get over the raw light. The models immediately put on their own clothes and everyone throws themselves in the shade and eats. When we decide to wait for the raw light to pass again after lunch, we take a long break from the set. Joanne wanders around the dam, catching frogs the size of a fingernail on the ground, and some of us run away when they bring them towards us… Everyone throws herself somewhere: either the trailer seats, the rugs laid on the floor, or our camp chairs… We take a look with our director and everyone is asleep… From styling to models, from models to hair, from hair to assistants and even the photographer slept… We go around with our director and take pictures of everyone while they are sleeping to show everyone at the end of the shoot.
We continue shooting when the sun starts to get a little bit lighter. Clothes, hairstyles, pops, and shooting angles are changing. We continue by taking small breaks from time to time until we successfully finish the narrative of the story we started. And we often borrow our stylist’s phone, which strangely helps us stay connected to the modern world as her phone is the only one with a signal among twenty other people’s.
Then one way or another, we completed the shooting… When everyone starts to collect their own equipment, we immediately took our laptops to a safe area and start to take a backup. When the backups were taken and all the equipment was packed, we got into the cars. We wished good evening to the Darlık dam, the calves, and the tiny frogs, and set off.
