Celeste Malvar-Stewart is a fashion designer that specializes in using locally-sourced, sustainable materials in the garments she makes. I’ve collaborated with Celeste several times over the years and the thing that I especially love about our shoots is how open she is with the way I interpret her garments. She simply hands me a garment bag filled with delicate treasures and tells me to style and shoot them however I please. I am someone who thrives in situations like this— just improvising and figuring it out as I go. The more I plan ahead, the more anxious I get at all the possible points of failure. If you don’t have a concrete plan you can’t be held responsible if you deviate from it.

I always walk away with fire when I shoot with Shelby, so I had her model the garments for me. For my approach to lighting and camera technique I knew that I wanted to mix blurred movement with definition since Celeste’s garments have the best textures. I used strobes on the background to create a crisp silhouette and a strobe with a snoot on Shelby’s face to keep her face from blurring. I filled in the rest of her otherwise-shadowed body with projections of different colors and patterns. I shot with a slow shutter speed (between 1/2 and 1/20 of a second) and intentionally moved my camera as I shot.