Three Cameras, One Model

A Canon EOS 30V, 5DSR, and OM System OM-1 walk into a bar...

In the spirit of celebrating at every possible moment on this new journey of mine, I present for your enjoyment another milestone: working with a previous model for a second time. I had no expectation to see Niana (@nianavirgis), this curvy Indonesian lass, again so soon, but here she is. In fact, I had instead been expecting a friend of hers (the one who apparently doesn’t really speak English, if you read the writeup for Niana’s first shoot), who didn’t end up making her planned trip to Hong Kong.

I’m taking Niana’s return as a compliment – she reached out to me when she knew she was coming back and offered to work together again. I realize that I’m paying her, so it is not the height of flattery per se that she’s back again, but she is at least proof that working with me isn’t deal-breakingly off-putting. It’s the little things.

A quick sidebar and shout-out to the women like Niana who do this kind of work, because not all photographers end up on the call-back list. Earlier on the day of our shoot, she had to deal with an extremely last-minute cancellation from another photographer, who then blocked her when she expressed dissatisfaction with his behavior (she was already on the way to the venue when he cancelled.) After our shoot, she intended to walk by herself and with her suitcase to the location of the next one, a good 20 minutes away. When I found out that this was her plan, I decided to walk with her to make sure she at least got to her next shoot safely. This isn’t unusual for working models! They often travel by themselves, arranging and coordinating shoots on their own, sometimes getting hassled by immigration on the way in (a young woman traveling alone must be up to something), other times being treated unprofessionally by photographers once they’re there. Three cheers for these intrepid women, I say.

While it was great to have a model come back to work together again, I also felt an obligation to change things up and try a notably different kind of shoot the second time around. Our first one was very standard fare – her hotel room for the venue and my usual two camera/two lens combination. I ambitiously decided to change every single one of those previous conditions, so I booked a new studio room and brought a very different loadout of camera gear.

All of these changes posed potential challenges. The room, first of all, while it looked great in photos on the studio’s website, appeared not to have any strong sources of natural lighting. This turned out to be true; in fact the room was entirely lit by artificial light sources of varying temperatures and intensities. After shooting in the dark, this is probably the next worst lighting situation for me to work in.

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.