Drowning a Wedding Dress
This was fun, at least for me. It was a bit scary for Anne Shackelford.
I'd wanted to do an underwater shoot for some time and things finally came together when Anne volunteered. She said she had a wedding dress that would could look great underwater because of it's variety of fabrics and the way they would move in the water. However, some of the fabric would be quite heavy once water laden and we were both concerned for her safety once she was in and weighed down and her movement restricted.
We gathered a few friends, one of which would be Anne's "lifeguard" right by her side throughout. Good thing too as he came in handy pulling Anne from the deep end to safety on several occasions. Don't try this at home kids!
Then we headed to my brothers pool. My brother Christian lives in San Antonio and built this pool in his back yard with a great medium grey color bottom. That color helped a lot in creating the look of deep open water. It doesn't hurt that it's a fairly large and deep pool but the color really made it amazing.
The dress, in several iterations of fabric layers, worked well after overcoming some issues and we ended up with several shots that I like a lot.
As for how I shot these? I'd like to say that I used my high end camera gear with underwater lighting and expensive underwater camera housings. However, I like saying even more that I shot these on two simple point and shoot cameras that can be used in water as deep as 10-20 feet. These cameras can be bought at Best Buy for a couple hundred bucks. Thanks to Christi Douglas Ford for lending them to me.
That being said, the images certainly don't come out of the camera looking like this. There is a lot of artistic PhotoShop work in these images.
So, who is Anne Shackelford? Anne is a friend I've shot with before. You'll see some of her and her work in my "Queen of Hearts", "Body Painting" "Boudoir" and yoga images. You can see those images in the "People" gallery however the "Boudoir" gallery is only viewable by it's participants. Anne is an incredibly talented artist specializing in hair, body painting, clothing / costume design, yoga instruction, and a variety of other arts. Here's a link to her website Chrysalis Austin:
