Short Notice? No problem 😎
If I do a paid model shoot while I'm on vacation, am I really even on vacation?
Today’s shoot is brought to you by the word impromptu1.
I’m still settling into this new life, which means that I’m not yet constantly thinking about models, locations, and writing and shooting content for this website. To wit: I made it all the way to Cebu in the Philippines and had been relaxing poolside for a day or two before it occurred to me that I could be shooting a model while I’m away for a week.
At this point I only had a window of about four or five days within which to find a model, send her a message, get a response, and arrange a shoot. I was not particularly optimistic given those constraints, nor was I heartened to see that there appeared to be all of two potential models in the vicinity. So I sent two messages, and two days later one of them did get back to me. Unfortunately it was to tell me that she wasn’t in the Cebu area at the moment. She did, however, know the other model (probably not a surprise, in hindsight), and offered to contact her directly to arrange something.
Great! Yes, of course, give her a call, I say. At this point the shoot needs to happen tomorrow or the day after, so I’m keen to get the details sorted. She asks if I’m ok working with a “not so slim model.” This causes some initial confusion, but after talking to both of them and looking at their modeling profiles (they frequently work together), I realize that “not so slim” to a Filipina model means that she has a bit of a belly that she’s not too happy about and feels the need to disclose before doing business. She is, to my Western eyeballs, quite slim, but I appreciate the candor.
Details confirmed – she’ll come the day after tomorrow, and we’ll do two hours of full nude work from 10 am. She’s not sold on the concept initially; she really wants to bring a prop or small accessory, something to add a pop of color and personality. I explain my current ethos of simplicity and purity – no fancy hair, prominent makeup, conspicuous jewelry – and she agrees, happy to keep it simple. Now I’ve got a venue, a concept, and a model.
A very conscientious model, it turns out. Since we agreed to start shooting at 10, I had woken up a bit earlier to go to breakfast, so as not to be rushed in prepping the room. She sends me a message at 8:30, saying she thinks she’s nearly at the hotel. “You’re very early!” I notice. Traffic is a notorious mess across the Philippines, and she’s traveling some distance for this shoot, so she had given herself quite a buffer. Ok then! I quickly finish my breakfast and sprint back to the room to pack up and hide everything I don’t want in the background of my shots. I only keep her waiting for about 15 minutes before collecting her at reception and bringing her back to the room. She still needs to prep her hair and makeup, so I wait a bit while she primps and preens in the bathroom, singing along to music on her phone.
There are other stressors besides a 90-minutes-early-model. The impromptu nature of this shoot means that, you know, I hadn’t planned on doing it, so I don’t have anything like a full complement of photo gear with me, nor had I chosen the hotel room with any consideration of the quality of light streaming into it. Otherwise I’d have brought two camera bodies and “the twins” (my beloved Panasonic f/1.7 zooms), but on this trip I’ve only got one body and one of the zooms (the wider one, 10-25mm). I’ve also got a much longer, slower zoom (a 50-200mm f/2.8-4) that was both too long and too slow for the day’s needs, so I did 95% of this shoot with the wide zoom. I even had to fashion a makeshift white balance card out of a random sheet of A4 paper. Not ideal at all, but hey, art from adversity.
As a shooting location, the hotel room offered mixed fortunes. It was plenty big to work in given that I only had a wide zoom, but it also had a covered porch outside the main window, providing quite a bit of shade even during the brightest time of day. I always try to shoot with available light and at my camera’s base ISO (200) for the cleanest images possible, but even around midday I needed ISO 400 at f/1.7 to keep the shutter speeds up. (“Up” is generous - I’m still shooting at like 1/30 sec. Don’t try this at home, kids.) So the bedroom half of the room was a little challenging and didn’t ultimately inspire the best stuff we got, but we worked it out with what we had.
The bathroom half, however, saved the day. The light falling on this side of the room was much stronger, warmer, and easily directed with dark wooden blinds spanning the entire window. The two rooms were separated by a lovely wooden double door (French door? I don’t know the difference. Is there a difference?) that provided a pleasing textured backdrop.
And then there was the tub. I’d never shot a model in a bathtub before, and to be honest I had only put this idea in the “maybe” pile when I was planning the shoot. I hadn’t even explicitly mentioned it to the model beforehand, so it’s a credit to her professionalism that she was happy to go for it at the end of the shoot. It wasn’t smooth sailing here either – she was too short to anchor her feet to the other end of the tub when she was sitting up out of the water, so she kept slipping and falling in. Luckily she thought this was funny. I also didn’t have anything taller than a chair to stand on for the top-down shots, so I had to hold the camera out in front of me and couldn’t really see what I was shooting. I really like the shots that we got here though – easily my favorites from the day.
A final shout-out to that 10-25mm zoom. Yes, it’s got ‘Leica’ written on it, but it really is a professional-grade, precision-engineered photon funnel. It’s astonishingly good wide open, rendering tack-sharp images with great color and contrast and with minimal chromatic aberration. And now I know I can shoot an entire indoor session with it, if push comes to shove.
Anyway, first properly impromptu shoot is in the books. All things considered, I’m calling it a success. On to the next one.
Of course I’ll give you the etymology of impromptu. It comes through French most recently, but ultimately it’s from the Latin phrase in promptū, which dates to the Classical period. The meaning, though, was “in public, openly” or “to have ready” or “to be easy”. Earliest attestations in English of impromptu are in the 1600’s, at which point it already had the still-current meaning of “extemporaneous, without preparation”. How it got that meaning in English isn’t clear, since it doesn’t appear that in promptū meant any such thing in Classical Latin. 🤷♂️