Release Your Wild – Lifestyle photo campaign for social media

Earlier this year, I had the chance to shoot for Release Your Wild, a social media marketing campaign for the Archery Trade Association, who were working with Weber Shandwick to create a series of photos to be used on their Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr accounts. With the success of the Hunger Games movie franchise, archery has never been more popular with teens. So the goal of the campaign was to start an online dialogue with that age group and hopefully draw more young people to the sport. Seems to be working! The Facebook page alone, which has been re-branded as Archery 360, currently has over 95,000 followers. Prior to bringing me on, the campaign had largely been shot on the east coast, so they wanted a new series of images that looked distinctly west coast. I knew just the place, so we scheduled the shoot at some local nature reserves in Malibu. What we didn’t expect was a lack of cooperation from the sun. A light drizzle sprinkled the windshield as my assistant, our makeup artist and I made our way in the dark up the PCH to the site, but we held out hope that the clouds would part. Luckily, just as the sun was coming up, they did, and we were able to work in some great morning light for the first hour or so. Then our luck ran out. Thick clouds blanketed the sky, graying everything out for the remainder of the 12-hour day. At least it didn’t rain! Normally, in these conditions I would have brought out the lights and tried to fake it as best as possible. Since this was for social media, though, the idea was that the shots would look very natural and not produced. So our tools were little more than a silver and gold reflector to bounce whatever light was available back into the scene. While the conditions weren’t ideal, the variety of shots we produced ended up working well and everyone was happy. We had a great time hiking around in the wild pretending to shoot at stuff. No real shooting however. Although we were accompanied by an archery expert the entire day, the models were not archers and we weren’t about to have them sending projectiles through the air willy nilly. Here are some of my favorites from the shoot and a couple examples as to what the finished product looked like.