Aim, from Australia (not Austria) 🤦♂️
Meta, please spend more time on the desktop version of Instagram.
It’s funny how quickly I’ve settled into the routine of doing this new job. Finding models, contacting them, hashing out the details of a shoot, setting a date, a time, and a place – I would agonize over every step at the beginning, not really sure what to expect or how to handle all of these things. Now, nearly a year and a couple dozen shoots later, I’ve reached the point where I can be so inattentive to details that I miss something basic and important about a model.
In this case, that important detail is where she’s from. Maybe that doesn’t sound like the most consequential information, but imagine my surprise when Aim greeted me in the lobby of her hotel in perfect Australian English without the slightest tinge of European influence. I expected this Australian lass to be Austrian. [Insert Jim Carrey from Dumb & Dumber GIF]
I can explain! Aim and I were communicating via Instagram, which I usually access via my desktop PC. (Yes, Instagram has a desktop version; no, I don’t recommend anyone ever use it.) For whatever reason, national flag emoji don’t render properly when viewed on Windows – instead they appear as country abbreviations in a weird capital letter font. In Aim’s profile info, it says AUS, which my brain decided meant Austria. Mercifully, the way I broached the subject was to ask whether she’s based somewhere in Europe, to which she countered that she’s in Melbourne, although she does have some Polish heritage. (I immediately figured out the source of my error and was happy that I hadn’t phrased my question, “So, how’s Austria?”) I still haven’t told her about this – if she’s reading, she’s far enough away now that I won’t hear her laughing at me.
The good news is that we share the same native language, so chatting with her was easier than usual (and than I was expecting). That’s useful for several reasons. Firstly, there doesn’t tend to be a wide variety of possible shooting locations in a small hotel room, so it’s easy to run out of ideas by the end and start scraping the bottom of the creative barrel, even with the model’s input. Being able to chat between frames really helps to pass the time meaningfully. Secondly, art nude models don’t even get out of bed for less than two hours of paid shooting – that seems to be the industry standard minimum. To be honest, I’m fairly confident I could get all the photographs I need for these articles in an hour, but the extra time allows me to get to know the model and have some meaningful interactions with her, which I can write about here in these interstitial paragraphs. That’s an important part of what I’m trying to do here – humanize the models and this kind of photography.
This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Aim, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.
👏