A Thai Double Feature

What happens when the agency sends a model and a translator who also happens to be a model?

Two for the price of one this week – meet Naksu (the blonde) and Xabarah (the not-Naksu), from the kingdom formerly known as Siam.

I was poking around on Model Mayhem for an upcoming long weekend in Bangkok, trying to find as much potential talent as possible to keep myself busy shooting content for Naked Prose, and I found Naksu. Obviously I had to try to get her on board – I mean just look how cute she is! When I reached out to her, a reply came back from the agency that handles her bookings. Yes, she’s available, and happy to work together, but there’s a rub: she doesn’t really speak English.

No matter! The agency has this covered. She will be accompanied by an assistant who will translate for her. Oh, actually, the head of the agency casually adds, the assistant is another one of their models, so I may as well just shoot both of them, back-to-back. I haven’t gotten this site off the ground by saying “no” to many opportunities, so I said, “what the hell? Send ‘em both over.” Two hours with Naksu first, with Xabarah there to facilitate communication, and then after a short break, Xabarah for another two. Ambitious, but I’m here to challenge myself.

I toyed around with the idea of finding some different shooting venues for this trip (because I ended up booking six models, five of whom actually showed up), but ultimately I decided against the faff of coordinating all of that in a city I don’t know in favor of a spacious hotel room that could offer me some choice and variety. Still, Naksu and Xabarah were models number three and four on the docket, so I had already done two full shoots in this hotel room before they showed up. Novelty was proving more elusive by the day.

I go down to meet the two of them in the hotel lobby, where Xabarah handles the pleasantries for both of them. Naksu, she tells me, is extremely shy.

I think this is one of the aspects of my craft that I’m weakest at – the initial get-to-know-you phase of the encounter. For I am also very shy, but I need to try not to be. Sometimes I get lucky, and the model is effortlessly chatty from the start; other times the model is Naksu, who wouldn’t say much to me even if she spoke English. Xabarah, it turns out, is the opposite – quite affable and extroverted – so the two of them are an effective pair.

So we get to the room, and Naksu gets settled while I talk to Xabarah about the shoot: what I’m looking for, how I tend to work, where in the room we can try some different things. I ask if Naksu really doesn’t speak English, because she’d be the only Thai model I’d booked who doesn’t, and it hadn’t been difficult to find locals in Bangkok’s many bars, restaurants, and massage venues who did as well. It turns out she does in fact understand and speak some English – she would just rather not because, well, she’s extremely shy. (I think I got hoodwinked into shooting two beautiful Thai models when I only asked for one! Darn the luck!)

Naksu emerges wearing a cute pink bra and underwear set, which looks great on her and adds a nice dash of color. I have been relatively strict on shooting artistic nudes in all of my sessions for this site, but given that I was shooting five different models in this one hotel room, I quickly learned that variety would need to come from many different sources, one of those being wardrobe, so I left her in it and directed her to the bed. Xabarah did her best to recapitulate our conversation about expectations in Thai, and when Naksu seemed to give the green light, we got to work.

Cute though her undies may have been, I’m not shooting for Victoria’s Secret here, so she worked her way out of them after a couple dozen poses on the bed. That would be it for clothed shots of Naksu, but I’m glad to have a few that are a little different from the rest. A brief stop on the floor next to the bed, where the light from the balcony doors shines brightest, and then out onto the balcony itself.

This was one of the features that sold me on this particular hotel. Ultimately it was a serviceable shooting location, one that I never hesitated to use with each model, but it wasn’t without its challenges. The balcony of the floor above perfectly covers the one below it, so a model even pressed up against the railing will still be in shadow when she faces into the room. (This is, to be fair, the sort of thing easily fixable with a reflector and an assistant, neither of which I had with me.) Its semicircular shape also hindered shooting the models from the side, and for some reason a rather sizable condenser unit for the room’s AC was unhelpfully sitting on each side. And then there was the issue of neighboring rooms – these are not private balconies – of which there were several to the left and to the right. Thankfully the models mostly didn’t care about this, and I suppose given their line of work that shouldn’t be surprising.

Oh, I almost forgot the worst part about the balcony – it’s farking hot in Bangkok. My metal camera lenses, chilled by the frosty AC indoors, immediately fogged up upon contact with the swampy Siamese atmosphere, necessitating an acclamation period every time I dared to venture outside. The models, of course, are consummate professionals, and get to work out there with nary a complaint. Xabarah, I think because she didn’t have much to do once we got going, dragged a chair onto the balcony for Naksu and started to direct her posing. (Models can be very creative people, so when they get an idea, I roll with it.)

Back inside, the next destination was the huge sliding mirror that closes the bedroom off from the rest of the suite. (For if there is a mirror, I will stick a model in front of it.) Not only is it nearly floor-to-ceiling, it also moves several feet laterally, allowing for a bit more creative freedom and background selection. Naksu seemed to know what to do with it without much direction, so as she twirled about, I moved hither and thither to find the angles for the best shots.

My last stop with Naksu was the living room, which gets zero natural illumination and only meager and incongruous artificial. When I first stepped through the door upon arrival, my immediate thought was, “well, I’m probably not going to be using this space for anything.” My second thought, thankfully, was, “it’s going to be a real slog shooting five models with just a bed, a mirror, and a balcony, so I’d better suck it up and figure something out.” Again, I don’t carry any off-camera (or even on-camera, for that matter) lighting with me, so all I have to work with are the lights in the room.

One of the solutions I worked out was putting one of the chairs directly under a single overhead spotlight, which created quite a dramatic and contrasty scene. One of the models likened it to an interrogation scene in a movie. It wasn’t nearly as daunting to shoot as it seemed: use custom white balance for the light temperature, bump up the ISO to 1600, use spot metering, and watch the histogram. With those adjustments, I was able to shoot rather freely, and so I did with Naksu, who shuffled herself around gracefully while I framed and snapped until her time was up.

After she was dressed and packed, she wanted to go out to the balcony and take some photos of the view with her phone. Xabarah made her ask me in English if she could, and it probably won’t surprise you that she had no trouble expressing herself perfectly comprehensibly.

We all took a break at this point – Naksu to go home, Xabarah to have a cigarette, and me to try to figure out what I could possibly do differently in the next two hours. Here’s an idea that I had all too late: close the solid curtains most of the way, directing a band of hard light through the balcony doors. That would have been good, had I only thought of it. D’oh!

I guess there’s no real concern that you’ll get the two of them confused, since Xabarah has dark hair and several prominent tattoos. She said they’re actually a liability in the modeling world; her manager has begged her not to get any more. They’re an important part of her though, as they tend to be for anyone, so I always ask when models have them. It’s all a bit too personal to reveal here, but Xabarah’s are a window into her life story and her personality for sure.

Inevitably Xabarah’s shoot was going to be at least partly like Naksu’s, just with her own poses and expressions, so I’ll focus on the things that stood out to me as unique. The experience of working with her in general was quite different, given how open and talkative she is. I got to know her much better than I could Naksu, obviously. Xabarah loves to be naked; in fact she says that she feels more like herself, more comfortable when she’s able to make art with her body. She feels something almost religious about the female form and its role in bringing beauty into the world; being a conduit for that is its own reward to her.

As for the shoot, I let her crawl around on the desk by the wall, which was still lit well enough by the balcony doors to be useful, and the desk had a slightly polished, mirror-like finish. I haven’t counted frames, but I feel like I reached for the 20mm anamorphic (the w i d e s c r e e n one) more often with Xabarah than with Naksu, although I used it in every shoot I did on this trip. I guess something about her just seemed a bit more cinematic. We skipped the chair on the balcony part, nor did we do any work with the giant sliding mirror. To be fair, it was the end of a three-shoot day in the same hotel room for me, and I was running on creative fumes, just trying to get some great stuff with this goddess-energy Thai woman.

We switched up the spotlight and chair scene quite a bit, invoking a different style and energy. She went full-edgy with the wardrobe: black lingerie with stockings and audacious heels. I gave her the smaller chair to work with, feeling that the neutral tones were more suitable for the scene and the shape less inviting of relaxed, lounging poses. Toss in a bit of Xabarah’s attitude and I think we created something fully her own.

And that was it! Two models, four hours, and several hundred photos, carefully curated and presented here for your appreciation. Thailand, you’re alright.