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.

The venue is her hotel room, a common arrangement for traveling models like Niana who are just here for the weekend, cramming in as many paid shoots as possible before moving on to the next big city. Hotels in Hong Kong are, like apartments in Hong Kong, notoriously small and expensive, so they don’t make for the best workspace for multiple hours. Luckily the room has a few different places for her to drape herself and a big window letting in a workable amount of late morning light. Still, the forecast called for ISO 400 any distance from the light source.

She had on a bright red bra and underwear set when we began shooting, but I had her toss it immediately. It was a great color on her, but I’m trying to keep it simple with full nudes, start to finish. I also find that tight-fitting clothing tends to leave marks on the model’s skin that can hang around for the entire shoot, and trying to buff them out in post is a right pain in the mouse-hand. I don’t tend to give too many preparatory instructions about hair, makeup, and jewelry, preferring to let the model present herself in whatever way makes her comfortable.

Niana was wearing some very conspicuous decorative contact lenses – you’ll see them in some of the tighter shots – that wouldn’t have been my preference, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I felt like asking her to change. Part of the fun of working with different women from around the world is, I think anyway, letting them be themselves, even if it’s only visible in the details.

We started working on the bed, where the light was the weakest and the background the busiest and most distracting. I think this was the least productive part of the room for us, but I knew there were better options, so I didn’t waste too much energy fretting about it. Nestled between the bed and window was an off-white colored seat just big enough for a typical-sized Indonesian woman to lie on, so we spent a better chunk of time exploring the angles there. Of course nothing can ever be too easy; jutting out of the opposite wall was an immoveable glass desk, which I had to bob and weave around like Muhammad Ali to get my shots in. I’ll pause here to praise mirrorless cameras, which all have movable LCD screens to enable confident shooting without looking through the viewfinder. This isn’t possible with SLRs, and it’s a difference that matters!

We spent the most time shooting by the window, which was flanked by a long, flat seating area and, even more serendipitously, a mirror on each wall. Not only was the light the strongest and easiest to work with, but the mirrors allowed for a creative framing that wouldn’t have existed otherwise and added some variety to the shots. It’s rarely ideal to shoot a subject who is severely backlit, especially when you’re not carrying as much as a reflector to bounce some light onto the subject. In these situations, I just crank up the exposure compensation until the model is properly exposed and let the window blow out if that’s the limit of the dynamic range. I find that with modern digital cameras, though, there’s still some detail to be found even in these lighting conditions, so it’s a workable strategy.

I felt like I was getting a fair number of usable shots in most of the places we were working, so, keeping an eye on the time, I decided to use the last half hour to try out some manual focus lenses that I hadn’t yet used in a model shoot. One is the TTArtisans 75mm f/1.5, which I’ve bought in Canon EF mount and attached to my OM System (née Olympus) camera using a Metabones Speedbooster. That adapter is also a focal length reducer (if your eyes are glazing over, just skip down to the photos of Niana, I won’t be upset), so this 75mm f/1.5 lens becomes more like a 107mm f/1.0. (75 x 2 x 0.71, plus one stop of light) A bit tight for a small hotel room – I was up against the wall shooting with it.

The other is a much more whimsical piece of glass – the Laowa 20mm T2.2 1.5x Nanomorph, an anamorphic cinema lens native to the MFT format. This lens is not intended for still photography, but nobody was there to stop me, so on it went. My latest camera bodies have a great feature to help shooting with manual-focus-only lenses like these: when you turn the focusing ring, the camera automatically zooms in to assist with focus and turns on focus peaking. Or at least that’s what it would do, if either of the last two aforementioned lenses had electronic contacts with the camera body. Alas, they do not. In the interest of time, I was also not manually activating the electronic zoom-in feature for every shot to check for critical focus, so many of the shots are slightly off. The Laowa is much more forgiving with its wider field of view and smaller aperture, but you do really have to be careful focusing the 75mm to get useable results.

One of the most freeing things about this work is that there really aren’t any rules beyond the ones I arbitrarily create for myself, so if I want to play around with some manual focus lenses and mostly get it wrong in the last part of the shoot, I’m going to go for it. Expect this kind of occasional heedlessness here, readers!