I've been busy in Bangkok - meet Cara Pin

I shot five models in three days on a trip to Bangkok. Too much? Probably! But I've got plenty to share...

Another day, another new nationality in my model Rolodex: meet Cara (IG: @cara.pin), the first Thai model I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Not her real name, mind you, but having seen her Thai name, I am quite confident in my inability to pronounce it, so she’s Cara to you and me. A small-town girl several hours removed from the chaos of Bangkok, she eventually moved to the big city for more economic opportunity. Modeling is her side hustle – her real job is in the clothing industry – but she knows the window is limited for this kind of work, and she loves it.

This is a part-business, part-pleasure trip for me, so I booked a hotel that’s equal parts comfortable and suitable for several model shoots, because boy am I cramming them in on this trip. Work/life balance be damned! I won’t say which hotel, but it turns out it’s the one where The Hangover Part II was filmed. I did not know this prior to booking, but the staff here point it out at every opportunity, so I’m going to assume that it’s true.

Right, so, shooting conditions – what have we got? The only source of natural light is the outside-facing part of the room, which opens to a balcony overlooking the Bangkok skyline. I’m on the 58^th floor, eye-level with some clouds and occasional light aircraft. Sounds swanky, I know, but I think every single room in this place has a balcony, so not only are we not special, but we also have neighbors in each direction, as far as the eye can see.

A true professional, Cara is undeterred and immediately wants to know if we’re going to shoot out on the balcony. Of course we are. It’s one of the reasons I chose this hotel amidst strong competition from others in the area. The good news (question mark?) is that the balconies are pretty useless, so guests tend not to spend much time out on them. Cara informs me that somebody jumped many years back, so the hotel has very much de-emphasized the balconies since then. (This must have been a tough decision for the hotel, as you will understand if you look up a picture of it.) Anyway, if you sign a waver they’ll unlock the balcony door for you, but there’s nothing out there except two condensers for the air conditioning.

All of this is to say that there were no nosy neighbors on either side to bother us, so we shot on the balcony. The weather was a bit unsettled today, so at this altitude the background was mostly a sea of white punctuated by the few other buildings that rival this one in stature. Cara had a little linen thing that she draped over herself for much of the shoot; I was happy with the bit of contrast and texture it added.

We spent some time shooting on the bed and then on the floor immediately next to it, where the light was strongest and most flattering. The cloudy weather outside meant that there was little need to use the diffusion of the sheer curtains, so I often opened them completely. There was a giant mirror on a sliding door that closes off the bedroom, so obviously we played around with that. She offered to put on some lingerie; normally I’d say no and just keep things simple, but she had a lacy red thing that I thought would compliment her skin tone nicely, so I told her to go for it. I think that was a good choice – I like the visual variety and the splash of color on her.

The most avant-garde part of the shoot was in the living room, far removed from the balcony’s warm, mid-day glow. When I first arrived in the room, I assumed that I was never going to use that half for any of my scheduled shoots, devoid as it is of any natural lighting. Not only that, but the light that is provided is scarce and inconsistent. Long-time readers will know that I don’t carry any off-camera (or on-camera, for that matter) lighting with me, so if I want to shoot in there I’d need to just flick some light switches.

In hindsight, I don’t know why this scared me so much. One of the skills I’m fast developing in this creative experiment is adaptability – show up and make it work somehow. I’m learning to lean on my fancy mirrorless cameras, which make getting the shot easier with every new iteration. A neutral gray target for white balance (which I now use in every shoot) completely solves the unappealing color-cast problem of artificial light, and the ultra-fast f/1.7 zooms I use mean that I don’t need to bump the ISO very far, even in dim, varied light.

So in the twenty minutes we had left, I just put her on a couch in there and went for it. She tossed on a pair of burnt-sienna pants for a bit, and my mind shifted more towards glamor/fashion – sharp angles and bold compositions, lots of attitude. It worked. She slipped them off and I went back to art nude, and that worked too. Lots of these shots are going to play well in monochrome, but some work in color as well. This was an important positive lesson – yes, I can make it work in a dark space with lighting that wasn’t put there by a photographer. I’ve already got ideas of what else I can do in there with the other local models stopping by - stick around to see those shoots too!

Cheers to Cara, my first Thai model, who has set the bar quite high for her fellow countrywomen.