Meet Cute-and-Curvy Niana

Four shoots, models from four different countries. Today's latest: Indonesia

Niana contacted me about shooting in Hong Kong about two months before her arrival, so I had been looking forward to working with her for a long time once the day finally arrived. Although this wasn’t something I had thought about beforehand, one of the most rewarding things about this new venture has been the opportunity to meet and work with models from all over the world. This is professional model shoot number four, country of origin number four – Indonesia.

Another unforeseen source of excitement (I’ll frame it positively) in this line of work is discovering just how much English the model speaks (or doesn’t!) when we meet in person for the first time. In Niana’s case, it’s some - let’s say enough to keep things moving. Like many second language English speakers in the world, she’s picked it up mostly via exposure to the language through popular media and books rather than through formal study in school. In fact the only other language she speaks is Arabic, which she did study in school. (I often forget that Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country; the largest one by population, in fact.) Niana recently connected me with a friend of hers, another Indonesian model whom I’m scheduled to shoot next month, who she informed me doesn’t speak a word of English. In-app translation is plenty good enough now to mask these kinds of things, so stay tuned to hear about how that goes for me.

Before I even made it up to her room, though, I was greeted by a friend of hers, who I didn’t know was going to be there. She’s also a young Indonesian woman, so she sort of looks like the model I’m expecting. It’s a bit like online dating, if you’ve had the misfortune of that experience – all you have to go on are a few photos of the person, some of which don’t even show their face very clearly and may be several years old, so the first meeting can be a bit fraught. She quickly introduced herself as Niana’s friend and took me up the elevator (which required the key card for floor-level access) to the room. Additional safety measure, I suppose – not unheard of or unreasonable in this line of work.

We start with the small talk once I arrive – I ask Niana if she’s already been shooting today, and if so, how it went. “A little rushed,” she says, “I didn’t wake up on time.” We were shooting at 10 AM, so she must have had a shoot at 8 or even earlier. I know I’m new at this, but even I’ve already adopted a policy of not shooting early in the morning. Niana’s experience (although she insisted this was the first time!) entrenches me further in the belief that this is the correct choice.

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