NYC Photo shoot – Part 1

We recently held a photo shoot on the streets of Manhattan to capture some pictures of the Agile Bag for use on our website and future marketing materials. It was exciting, not only because it was the first photo shoot my wife and I have been involved with, but also because it was the first time our bag would be seen in public. This entry will be the first of two that will document how it all came together.

Part 1: Preparation

The first thing we had to determine was where the photo shoot would take place. There were really a lot of different possibilities given that we live in NYC. While we were developing the bag, we had envisioned an advertisement of a group of girls dressed up for a tea party, complete with accompanying myWallaby bags and dolls. This would not only show the bags on the girls, but it would also let us show the bag on the ground in the sitting position too. In addition, we thought it would also be nice to show other “about town” type shots, including girls out shopping, walking around town, at a playground, that sort of thing. Based on what we wanted for a backdrop, we decided on shooting in Central Park and the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

From the very beginning, we thought it would be great to get our friend’s daughters involved as “professional” models. While we may be a little biased, we felt that we were lucky in that our friend’s daughters were naturally beautiful and represented just the kind of girls we were looking for. So, we approached four of our friends and they were more than happy to help us out with the shoot.

The moms got into from the very first moment we mentioned the idea. Since we didn’t have the funds for wardrobe considerations, each mom helped out by emailing each other and us various outfit ideas. The moms even had their daughter’s strike poses with the outfits based on what we had described to them. The girls really enjoyed this as well and seemed to have a blast playing the role of models-for-a-day (see pictures to left and right of our models hamming it up for the camera). One mom even had her daughter in staged shots pouring tea and talking to imaginary friends. It was a real delight opening up emails and seeing what they were coming up with.

Besides capturing the images we needed for our website, we really wanted to make the photo shoot an event that the girls would never forget since they were helping us get our company started. We hired a professional photographer and a hair salon on the Upper East Side (see pictures below of the models getting the royal treatment at the hair salon). I think this helped get the girls in the right frame of mind for the shoot in that it really provided the royal treatment.