Double Your Pleasure?

This week's adventure: twice as many models in the room, half the shooting time!

There’s a scene in the 1999 cult classic film Office Space in which the protagonist, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), asks his neighbor Lawrence (Diedrich Bader) what he’d do if he had a million dollars.

“I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.”

Hopefully today’s post, the art-nude photographer’s equivalent of two chicks at the same time, would make Lawrence proud. To be honest, though, the prospect of working with two models simultaneously is actually more terrifying than exciting. The addition of a second model somehow seems not to double the difficulty of the shoot, but to triple it: I need to be mindful not just of each model’s pose and expression, but also the interplay between them, to say nothing of the usual concerns of balance and composition.

It won’t be shocking, then, to learn that this was not my idea; these two Ukrainian ladies (honestly I’ve met more Ukrainian women in the past few months than I had in the previous forty years, not that I’m complaining) were traveling together around southeast Asia and suggested that we all work together. The two of them know each other quite well and have modeled in tandem many times, which immediately removes a lot of the complexity of a shoot like this. They also proposed that we shoot for one hour and offered their accommodation as the location. Neither of those particulars is ideal for me, but in the spirit of wanting to keep things fresh and challenging, I agreed to one hour, two models, at their location.

…a location that turned out to be in the hilly part of central Hong Kong, up about two hundred stairs depending on the approach vector. Google maps plotted a terrible one and, accepting it uncritically, I climbed all of the stairs. In fact I walked past the place initially, so I got to redo part of the route in descent as well. All of this while carrying my gear in my brand-new Peak Design roller bag, which now became the least convenient way I could have chosen to carry my crap. Also it’s mid-day in mid-June, 86^oF (30^oC) and 90% humidity. The cherry on top: as soon as I arrive, I recognize that the building is a walk-up. ::chef’s kiss::

Mercifully, the ladies’ room was only on the first floor, but I was still a sweaty mess upon arrival. Having seen the building from the outside, I already knew what I was in for, and it’s exactly what I expected: a small space in an old building with sparse light and minimal furniture for scene changes. Other fun surprises included what appeared to be a small emergency-glass-breaking hammer on a chain hanging on a random cabinet and, to the complete befuddlement of the girls, a rather large hand saw hanging on the wall. 🤷‍♂️ I spent the first several minutes chatting with the two models, partly because I enjoy meeting these women and hearing their stories, but also because I needed a minute (or six) to try to cool off.

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