A fantasy ruin with Holly – a collection of 9 images

Steven Perdikis

This work was completed with local model Holly, and if you follow me on a regular basis, you’ll see that we have produced a large body of work together.

I absolutely love the location that we chose for this fantasy inspired shoot. The general concept behind this series of images was a damsel, lost in the forest near her kingdom, while an invading army draws closer and closer to her own home amid the castle walls.

These ruins are an old, abandoned church in the Adelaide Hills, dead smack in the middle of a graveyard. It is a fantastic location – and you wouldn’t know it is there if you weren’t looking for – you can legitimately not see the walls from the tree for this location.

Steven Perdikis Photography - Adelaide Portraits, Weddings and Fine Art Photographer

The outfits were op-shop finds – and the drive up to the location was one full of detours due to road closures owing to a rally that was occurring close to the location. All of the images were shot on the Nikon Z6, using a variety of lenses, including a 24-70 f/2.8 (an adapted Tamron lens) – the Nikon Z 85mm f/1.8, and the Nikon Z 14-30mm f4 lens.

The images were lit with a Godox AD600BM in an enormous softbox that barely fit through the doorway to the ruin. It’s a small space.

The sun disappeared from this location very quickly as we worked on making images, which while not cutting our time short, definitely saw a rapid decline in the temperature – which meant that we needed to get a move on to get home, especially with the dangerous drive down the hills that awaited the conclusion of the photo shoot!

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