More from Ukraine! Meet Merylin

Thoughtful and hard-working, she made it easy to get the most out of a tiny hotel space.

I wondered how many models I’d be able to work with before I had a second one from the same country, and this shoot with Merylin ends the streak at five. She’s also Ukrainian, just like Anna, the model from my second professional shoot; in fact the two of them are friends and work for the same modeling agency. Like Anna, Merylin left Ukraine many years ago and now lives abroad, splitting her time between Bali and Barcelona (she’s a surfer).

Even though she didn’t add a new country of origin to my list of collaborators, she still brought plenty of new things to the shooting experience. She’s the first so far to ask me, very directly, what I expect from her during the shoot. (You might think this is always an explicit conversation at the outset, but so far that has not been my experience.) Anyway, it was a great opportunity for the two of us to get a better idea of what needed to happen over the next two hours, so I’m glad she asked. She was already wearing the large hoop earrings when I arrived but was willing to take them off if I wanted. I thought about it for a good five or ten seconds. (You can see my decision in the shots. Right call?)

Another aspect of this shoot that was new and different was the amount of input and feedback that Merylin wanted from me. This is an aspect of my craft that is decidedly underdeveloped right now; I openly admit that directing models isn’t a strength of mine. I’m like the George Lucas of nude photography. I was shooting with two cameras and lenses, as usual (the twins), and after a couple rounds of shooting she wanted to see what I’d captured so far. Perhaps it’s my relative inexperience with this kind of shooting, or my introversion, or my perfectionism, but my first feeling at this request was terror.

You can imagine my internal monologue. Oh god, she’s going see these photos and be like, “what the hell is this guy doing?” It only lasted a few seconds before my calm, rational brain reminded itself that I actually do know what I’m doing with a camera, and she wants to see the photos to assist her posing, not my composition. I put them both on image review mode and let her flick through everything I’d shot so far, which she did with alacrity, studying herself closely across the frames. She saw some things she could improve in her posing, and we got back to work.

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