Laulau, the Parisian Fashionista

A late afternoon shoot forced me to get creative with the available light...

For today’s post, meet Laulau, who has come all the way from Paris on a little modeling tour of Southeast Asia. She’s not a native Parisian (which explains why she was generally pleasant and fun to work with 😉) but was born in the West African nation of Benin. She’s got to be the first… Beninite? Beninner? Oh fine I’ll look it up… Beninese (or in French, Beninoise) person I’ve met, and an unexpected nation of origin to add to my list of international models. I think she’s also the most famous model I’ve worked with to date, at least if Instagram counts – she has over 30k followers on her main account at the time of writing, although that’s for her fashion-focused work. (She posts things like nudes on her much smaller personal account.)

Not without good reason! She’s quite striking, talented, and widely published in fashion magazines. You’ll excuse me if I thought she had mistaken me for a more famous photographer when she reached out to schedule a shoot. I was also afraid (as I always am with models, I’ll admit it) that she’d be a bit stuffy, serious, demanding, aloof – this is a woman who has been working with professionals in the industry for years. What if she just hasn’t got the patience for me and my nonsense?

As always – I’ll learn this someday – I was wrong about the model. She was kind, talkative, helpful, engaged – all the things that models have tended to be, in my experience. That’s not to say the shoot went off without a hitch – far from it, in fact. First of all, when she came down to greet me in the hotel lobby (we agreed to use her hotel room for the shoot), she mistakenly grabbed a plastic card that wasn’t her room key, so we weren’t able to get back into the room without some help from the front desk. Once we made it to the room, another problem – payment. International models generally have no use for local currency, so I have to defer to whatever electronic payment method works for them. Usually it goes smoothly; this time it did not. I don’t know how long I spent faffing about with different online payment services – eventually I just had to shelve it so we could get going with the shoot.

Which was scheduled, I’ll add, from 5 PM on a weekday. At this point I’m still working a separate full-time job, so I tend to schedule my shoots on the weekends. This was the first time I had a shoot after working a full day at my “real” job, so I was already flagging a bit, and we had a limited amount of daylight to work with, given the late start.

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