Long Highway

The Idea

Creative Inspiration comes from the most interesting of ways. The inspiration from this shoot was inspired by a song I was listening to on the radio a while back. The song was Amazing by Aerosmith, not their best song, but that was not the point. My wife happened to have the music video playing in the background one Saturday, and I happen to catch the video while I was in the kitchen. To my surprise I saw that a young Alicia Silverstone was the actress acting in the video. Seeing the video, the outfit, and the setting, it inspired me to recreate that look and style in the video, as well as the feeling and look of a true 90s photoshoot. The first one that came to my mind was the Levi's Jeans print ads, which typically were out in a wide open field, with a grainy, film feel to the image. 

The Shoot

I asked Mackenzie to choose an outfit that called back to Alicia Silverstone's outfit in the video, which was very much the look back in the 90s. I had her act out a story like her car had broken down in the middle of nowhere, and she had to make the long walk back to civilization. She flawlessly expressed the anger and frustration someone would go through back in the days when cell phones were not commonplace. 

The Tire

As we made our way down the dirt road back to the highway, I found an old abandoned tire nestled in the dust and dirt. I grabbed it, and pulled it out closer to the road, and had Mackenzie sit on the tire like she had removed the tire off her car and was waiting for the tow. That was when I got the shot I knew was the one I had imagined in my head was the shot.

The Hitchhiker

We moved out to the Highway, and we finally got a major part of the video that inspired the project. In the video, Alicia Silverstone starts making her way down the road, thumb out, looking for that good Samaritan, which she ultimately does. In this shoot, however, there was no guy on a bike to pick up our leading lady.

The Long Highway

The final stretch was capturing the name of the shoot. Mackenzie absolutely killed it with these shots by the highway, which was a fun game of getting on the road, yelling car and stepping back off the highway. Felt like we were kids playing baseball in the street.

In Post

Finally, in the editing process, I had to go and create the visual style similar to the polaroid's back in the day. Looking back at images from the era, most people were unable to tell the difference. It was when I decided to go back through this shoot for the blog that I saw a great amount of growth that could be done with these. Especially now with the recent surge in popularity of using film photography.

I started doing deep dives into film photography and trying to find ways to mimic the look and feel of specific film types and using them in my existing and future shoots. As I dug in more and more, I finally started creating presets in Lightroom that expressed the look I wanted, while looking very, very close to what the actual film shot would look like if I shot them with a film camera. I think I will go more into this in a future post. Stay Tuned......