Earl Mabaquiao ( AKA Earl Luigi) is in his fourth and final year in the Fashion program at Kwantlen University. He’s an amazing individual who has gone on to win national acclaim. He was crowned “Canada’s Breakthrough Designer” after winning the 2011 TÉLIO Competition at Montreal Fashion Week and has since participated in many other competitions and events. You can check him out on his website (which I helped build ^_^) for more information and to take a look at his designs: earlluigi.com

I went back home to Vancouver for a quick vacation during my Reading break and so Earl and I arranged a photoshoot. We shot at his school and mostly shot in the parking lot.

We started off with some portraits of Earl in the school.

Then we headed down to the parking lot to shoot two of his designs. This one is his first design.

This is actually a pretty interesting piece as it transforms into various different looks:

This is his other piece. This pic was used in the Vancouver Sun Check out the newspaper page at the bottom.

The details in this piece are made of Pina from strands of Pineapple straight from the Philippines!

The model for this shoot is the very beautiful Monika Georgieva. She happens to also be a Fashion student at Kwantlen. Also from Kwantlen was the makeup artist, Venus Lai.

So there you go. Earl has gone through a lot and done some very amazing things in his four years at Kwantlen. He’s going to go on and do some awesome things. Watch out for him!

Shoot Credit:

Designer: Earl Luigi
Photography: Charles de Jesus
Model: Monika Georgieva
Hair & Makeup: Venus Lai

Front Page of the Style Section

One of the pictures we took made it into the Vancouver Sun! They had an article on the front page of section C that featured graduates of the Kwantlen Fashion Program. Earl got the biggest pic  

Photographers Info

For the most part, I used this light setup below.  The key light is a 60″ Brolly box using a Lumopro160 speed light. Beside it, I used an SB600 with a Lumiquest Softbox III for a hair light. Finally, the light at camera right is a YongNuo560 shooting through a normal 43″ umbrella which is used somewhat as a rim/back light. None of these flashes were at full power and they didn’t need to be because I was trying to blur the background a bit so I shot between f4-f5.6. It’s also a fashion shoot so I didn’t want the model to wait between poses so I wanted as short a recycle time as possible haha. I wanted a clean picture too so I shot at ISO 200.

This behind the scene is shot at 24mm using my 24-70 so that I could get everything in for this shot. But for the actual shoot itself, I used my 70-200 and mainly shot more telephoto closer to the 200 range. The reason I did this was for the compression of the background and the unique look it gives compared to shooting more wide angle. I wanted the background to look bigger and a bit more blurred so I took that into account and just shot long.