Amelia Riven, an Estonian Beauty

She was just passing through Hong Kong, as luck would have it.

One of the difficult things about finding models to work with is that they travel a lot, so even if I find one based in a place I intend to be, there’s a good chance she won’t actually be there when I am. Model Mayhem requires a location for its search queries, and the results you get are determined by where models say they are. (And some are better at updating their locations than others.) If I want to shoot in Singapore next month, for example, but I search today, I’ll get models local to Singapore and international ones passing through at the time of searching who will have moved on by the time I get there.

This can also work out in the opposite direction – a model could be in my area but not show up in a local search, so she comes and goes without me even realizing. As I was planning a future trip to Bangkok for a full weekend of shoots, I found a modeling agency who happened to represent a model neither local to Bangkok nor Hong Kong, who just happened to be visiting here the following weekend. Blind luck, but I’ll take it – so I scheduled a shoot with her. Meet Amelia, the pretty Estonian lass you see here. (Follow her on Instagram.)

As soon as I saw her portfolio, I knew I had to grab the black room at my favorite local shooting venue. Luckily it was still available on short notice, so I booked it for two hours. She met me outside the building entrance. “I have a pink luggage!” she informed me, as if I was going to have trouble picking her out of a crowd in southeast Asia. She marveled at the building, a sizable old industrial estate, as we took the rather dingy elevator and exited onto an unadorned concrete hallway.

This is actually quite common in Hong Kong – businesses of all sorts will buy up floors on old industrial estates and renovate them for all kinds of things – hair salons, coworking spaces, meeting rooms – even as the buildings still continue to house companies using them for heavy industry. It’s the only way to operate a place like this shooting venue affordably – though it’s still not exactly cheap. Hong Kong either has rather capacious zoning laws or lax enforcement of them.

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 Amelia, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.