For their April 2019 Wedding Destination Special, Condé Nast Traveller India chose amazing Seychelles as their shoot destination and designer Sabyasachi as their fashion director.
The team took Miss World Manushi Chhillar and models Archana Akil Kumar, Eugeniya Belousova, Stana Mousbe and Anuj Choudhry to the Desroches Island where we The Four Seasons Hotel hosted us to put together a wedding reenaction in which Manushi would star as the bride. Elton Fernandez and his team did the hair and makeup.
This shoot was a very exciting shoot for me. I had wanted to go to Seychelles ever since I was a child and as a photographer I discovered paradise. For me personally, I love to shoot with natural light and nothing more and Desroches gave me the absolutely perfect scenery for that. The natural colour of the sea and the sky we unreal in their beauty and the light was so beautiful and crisp. And being in an almost private island gave us these amazing beaches that were entirely empty and I could shoot wide, cinematic shots. The fact that the beach sand in Seychelles is white was perfect as it was giving me a natural light bounce. So even at hours where light becomes too harsh, I never had hard shadows on the faces when we were shooting at the beach-front.
Another thing that made this shoot amazing from the very beginning is that Sabyasachi wanted the images to be real and light so he didn’t care about getting his clothes wet or being afraid of ruining them. We started the whole shoot with Archana, Eugeniya and Stana, who were playing the bridesmaids, jumping around in the water and eventually getting in the water completely. Not only did the mood skyrocket from the very first shot but we also ended up with some amazing photos.
The scenery is was so great it was very easy to “play” the wedding part. It is very easy to imagine why a couple would choose that place for their wedding. Little Elisabeth Francis, a local girl from Seychelles, dressed head to toe in Sabyasachi, played the flower girl and her presence alone transformed the shoot.
Photo assistant: Ankit Sharma
