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.

Anyway, this was my first time using the black room, so I only knew it from pictures on the venue’s website. It’s listed as being a bit smaller than the white room that I used in my inaugural shoot with Angie, and it doesn’t have a bed, so I was slightly worried that our shooting options would be a bit more limited.

Not so at all! We had no trouble filling two hours with the scenes the room offered. In fact I’m sure there are a few more ideas we left unexplored. Despite being the black room, there was copious late-morning illumination from the wall-length window spanning the room’s longest dimension. It had both a sheer and dark curtain to stretch over it, neither of which was necessary on this uniformly overcast day. The light from outside was already streaming in perfectly attenuated for my model’s fair skin, so I kept the curtains open in the interest of maximum photons for my lenses.

Still, base ISO was just a bit out of reach, so I bumped it up to 400 for most of the shoot, dialing in a little positive exposure compensation to keep the shadows clean. (When you’re shooting with smaller sensors, expose the scene properly and look at the histogram. I don’t care if it clogs up the EVF – just do it!)

I’m also trying something new for this shoot – using Tiffen Glimmerglass filters on my lenses. They’re designed to add some diffusion to highlights and roll off some of the clinical sharpness that modern cameras and lenses produce. Sharpness is great in most situations, but I’m not really interested in capturing every imperfection of the woman in front of me in sharp detail and high resolution. Diffusion and mist filters help to reduce some of that while preserving the focus and contrast of the image. Glimmerglass comes in a variety of obtusely labeled intensities: 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 3, and 5. Why the fractions double but the whole numbers don’t is one of life’s great mysteries. I went with 1, because I had a bad experience with fractions in 5^th grade. Anyway the effect is still quite subtle to my eye, but there’s a whole world of diffusion filters out there if you’re looking to add a bit of character to your shots.

Back to the shoot. We started on one of the couches on the far wall, probably the weakest light of any of the obvious shooting areas. Still plenty workable, but there was the challenge of keeping some separation between her very dark hair and the dark furniture and walls throughout the room. The couch was also a shiny leather that was quite glare-prone from certain angles. I still think we managed some good stuff, but I think we had better luck everywhere else.

I kept to my usual game plan of setting the model up in a place and a pose and then just letting her work through her repertoire. If she does something I want to work a bit longer I’ll pipe up so she doesn’t move on to the next pose; otherwise I leave the professionals to their craft. One thing that I noticed pretty early on with Amelia, though, is that she has an incredibly cute smile. (See above!) I made sure to let her know immediately that it really worked for me, which was important because she said it wasn’t something she would have done much without prompting. In my (admittedly limited) experience, models often default to looking more serious and not making direct eye contact with the lens. I’m finding that I really like a happy model looking right at me, so I need to learn to ask for it.

Amelia dutifully took the comment on board and added a smiling gaze to her bag of tricks, and I found myself helplessly smiling back every time she pulled it out. (I can’t be the only one – raise your hand if you’re charmed. Don’t lie!) Actually she was a very active creative partner throughout the shoot – she grabbed the key from inside the old mailbox chest to pose with it, she noticed the reflection in the cabinet in the kitchen area, she moved the standing mirror to get the look she wanted, she reached for the light above the counter and lit her face with it. She’s only been modeling for a bit over two years, but she’s got it sorted.

We made our way around most of the space, gobbling up as much of that beautiful diffuse light as we could. She was a trooper lying on the white countertop – it was quite cold to the touch. We joked that it was like getting into a pool – shocking at first but fine once your body adjusts to the temperature. Unlike water in a pool, however, it only touched part of her at a time, so she effectively had to jump in over and over.

Regrets? Maybe just one. While Amelia was getting (un)dressed for the shoot, I was surveying the room and removing anything that could be a potential distraction in the background. I looked at the paper towels and the cutting boards at the back of the kitchen. I don’t know what to attribute it to (laziness? wishful thinking?), but I decided to leave them there. So, if you’ve been looking at any of these and thought to yourself, “this would be a better shot without that cutting board in the background,” that’s on me. Otherwise, I’m happy with how this one turned out.