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.

Eventually we did get going, and things went pretty smoothly thereafter. Laulau selected some white lingerie to kick things off, and we got to work. The room was big by Hong Kong standards, which is to say that it was what passes for a regular hotel room in much of the rest of the world. “The room is a normal size, not very big,” Laulau noted when we walked in. “Normal size in Hong Kong is big,” I countered, to which she added, “same in Paris!” We talked a lot about our two adoptive home cities, noting a not-insignificant number of similarities. It was interesting to hear her take on Paris as a francophone who grew up in a very different place.

Anyway, we worked a fair amount on and around the bed area, which had adequate space to move but an inordinate amount of background clutter. A certain amount of this is unavoidable in hotel rooms, but I always try to move or hide any environmental distractions that aren’t nailed down. In this case, on each side of the bed was a large black reading lamp and a bevy of (also black) light switches that couldn’t be moved or easily covered. The wall behind the bed also had three different sized, asymmetrically arranged paintings. I generally don’t go as far as removing wall decorations in hotel shoots, but I can’t say that I wasn’t tempted. These distractions are getting easier to remove with software by the day, yes, but that takes time, time that adds up if you need to do it in a couple dozen images. As ever, better to get it right in-camera.

On the whole, I’d say that the bed-focused stuff we got was good. The room had a pleasing array of warm tones that complemented Laulau’s skin tone nicely, and the late-afternoon sun shone obliquely through the large window to the left of the bed. Along that window, which ran the length of the room, was a desk and a long padded window seat, which offered the only other obvious place to shoot.

I had left the window uncovered up to this point to admit maximum photons, but as Laulau took a position on the window seat, I decided that the plainly visible scene flanking her was too busy and distracting to include in the frame, so I fully lowered the sheer curtain. This completely transformed the mood of the scene and offered a great contrast to the warm, even light from earlier.

Knowing that this was probably the only other look I was going to get from this room, I threw everything I had at it. I got in close to work with the wide zoom, I backed away to compress the scene with the tele zoom. This was a great setting for silhouettes, so I asked Laulau to use more demonstrative, flowing poses to accentuate her contours. The heavily diffuse light was also quite pleasing for portraits, so I sat in front of her and used the window as a giant softbox, grabbing some tighter shots. I eventually swapped the zooms out for an anamorphic cine lens and a longer manual focus portrait lens to get a wider variety of looks with this light.

It certainly wasn’t the easiest shoot to get going, but by the end I think we found a groove and got some great stuff. Laulau was easy to work with, and great to talk to along the way. We had fun taking turns hitting skip on the YouTube ads that kept interrupting the music streaming on her laptop – it seemed to get funnier every time it jarringly silenced the deep house tracks she had selected. I think one of the more underrated skills photographers need to develop is adaptability, and I’m embracing that challenge with every shoot. Art from adversity, as they say, whoever they are.

Until next time! Please do share my work with others who you think might enjoy it.