Nikki Atkinson worked as a couture bridal designer in Adelaide for most of a career before moving to Wilmington, in the Southern Flinders Ranges, where she now makes wedding gowns from Australian merino wool.

The idea had been with her for the best part of twenty years, since a friend from a sheep property asked for one, and it took until 2022 to find fabric worth building a collection from.

She needed a look book, a bank of images for her wider marketing, and a set of reels to explain the thing most people get wrong about wool: it holds an even temperature in the heat as well as the cold, not only the cold. Film and stills, side by side, in a single day.

Lookbook photography in one studio setup

We started at Cog creative space in Norwood with a setup that stayed put all morning, so the dresses could come through steadily instead of the day stopping every time something changed. Model Stevie Hurl carried the pace without letting the performance drop, and between gowns we shot Nikki’s pieces to camera for the reels. Those clean frames are the ones doing the catalogue work: the beaded sleeve, the flowers stitched at the shoulder, the blue gown caught mid-turn.

Golden hour in the grounds at Sacred Heart College

The second half was scheduled deliberately for last light at Sacred Heart College, where the sandstone colonnades, the arched timber doors and the hedged gardens gave the same dresses somewhere to live. Same garments, an entirely different register: a veil lifting across the light, black appliquéd dresses against the stone, ivory against green.

What Horrocks Vale needed the images to do

One day had to produce the look book, the wider set of marketing images, and enough video for Nikki to keep teaching her customers what merino actually does for them. It was tight, with travel in the middle of it and plenty of moving parts, so we built the schedule and the crew around moving quickly (video by Brighteyes Films) and got through the brief without quietly dropping anything out of it.

For a label whose whole argument is that the fabric works harder than people expect, the pictures had to as well.