You all know how I love a floater, so I about hit the roof when I saw the fashion images Jill Greenberg shot for the latest issue of RADAR Magazine. I think this is a darn clever and un-boring way to simultaneously showcase clothes and shoes and the U.S. Olympic Synchronized Swimming Team.

Clothes! Shoes! Synchronized Swimming! Seriously, this could be a musical.

In any case, I tracked down the brilliant photo editor Stacey Pittman at RADAR (also a PS photographer), who produced the shoot, to tell me how it all came together, because man, does that look complicated.

High-tech IM interview follows:

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RH: Did Jill Greenberg do that swimming fashion shoot just for you guys?

SP: Yeah, I produced it. RADAR loves working with Jill, she also shot Lindsay Lohan for us. Our editor in chief Maer Roshan is a big fan!

RH: It’s great, where was it shot, how did it happen, did Jill don scuba-gear?

SP: Outside of San Francisco, Pleasant Hill. We had to do hair and makeup at their apartment because their rival team was practicing and thought they would steal their moves. She was underwater the whole time with a scuba instructor. There was housing on the camera with two flashes and it was a monster, I have a picture of it.

RH: Ooh, you don”t want to share that, do ya?

SP: This is her assistant holding it. Jill couldn’t hold it above water but worked it out underwater. She also rented a cherry picker for the overhead shot. It wasn’t tethered so she had to come up to put card in to check images. She was also trying to work out a system to have her lights fire using
a water bottle and a slave but she could explain that better. It didn’t
work out but was pretty darn smart. She knew exactly what she wanted – she had a vision.

RH: It seems complicated! Plus, the coordination of all the fashion…

SP: It was kind of a bear to produce because the pool we were going to shoot in fell through the night before I left for San Francisco, because someone had been paralyzed there some years before and sued the city
so the insurance and responsibility requirements were insane.

I found another one but it was surrounded by buildings, not grass and blue sky like the other one. That’s why the leg and high heel shot goes black in the back, because there was some ugly building in the background. The stylist was amazing though, and had some great stuff and a lot of really beautiful shots didn’t make it in because of space constraints.

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