She's back from Bangkok - Cara 😎

No cramped hotel room this time - a cramped apartment instead!

Back in May (which was seven months ago now!) I took advantage of a long holiday weekend and shot a bunch of models in Bangkok. The first one I worked with was Cara Pin, and as it turns out, she’s also the first of the models from that weekend whom I’ve been able to work with again. She came my way this time, renting an apartment for her stay via Airbnb. That might not seem strange, but Airbnb isn’t generally a great option in Hong Kong – apartment owners would rather have full-time renters, and the private spaces you do find for short stays here aren’t usually any bigger (or cheaper) than hotel rooms. So you neither avoid the typical Hong Kong problems (small spaces, high prices) nor get the amenities of a hotel.

“I need to have a kitchen to cook because I’m on a diet,” Cara explains. She doesn’t look any more in need of a diet than she did when we first worked together, but I’m not a model, so what do I know? Anyway, we’ve got this little apartment space to work with, so I start to survey the situation as she tends to her hair and makeup.

It’s a typical (and I mean that in a bad way) Hong Kong floor plan: bathroom immediately to the left as you walk in the door, kitchen immediately to the right. Ahead is the “main” room – the only other space in the apartment that isn’t the one bedroom it has, but it also rather resembles a hallway. Just beyond that is a folding door that leads outside to the balcony. I didn’t measure this precisely, but I suspect it’s not even big enough for two people to sit side-by-side. Pointlessly small, let’s call it. There’s not much to say about the bedroom, either – it’s about 95% bed, 5% room.

There are some silver linings in this cloud of an apartment. The living room windows have a sheer curtain (quite like a hotel, weirdly) to soften the late morning sun a bit, and the balcony does give me something a little different to work with for a local shoot. There’s also Cara, who I find to be disarmingly cute and friendly. She’s got that focused, serious model look throughout her portfolio, but please know that she is, in fact, a total goofball who loves to chat and constantly makes herself laugh.

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