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.

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