Yara - A Pleasant Surprise

I'll be honest, I was not looking forward to this shoot.

I had just gotten back from Milan a day and a half earlier (a 7-hour time difference) and had worked a full day at my “real” job. I didn’t even have time to stop at home first – I had my camera gear with me at work and took a taxi directly to the model’s hotel when I clocked out. A model, incidentally, that I wasn’t even all that excited to work with, because (yeah, I’ll say it) I thought she was a bit too skinny for art-nude work. Oh, and the shoot was in the late afternoon, so I knew I would run out of daylight at some point in the middle of it, leaving me with whatever lighting was in the hotel room.

Suffice it to say, then, that I was not in the fucking mood to do this shoot. Nor did things improve when I got up to the room. She commenced the usual show-and-tell, spreading her many lingerie options out on the bed. She was kneeling by the side of the bed while she did this, so I knelt down on the other side (it felt weird to be standing over her). “Oh no, don’t do that!” she said, sounding a bit concerned. I have no idea what I did or why it was a problem, but I immediately felt bad and had no idea what to do to fix it. I froze and did nothing, just letting her get on with the underwear show, which she thankfully continued. (I still have no clue what that was about!) She sounded eager to get on with things, asking me almost as soon as I got through the door what I wanted her to wear and where we should start. My mood sank even further, afraid that she wasn’t interested in between-scenes chit-chat. Chit-chat that I, as a massive introvert, need to make myself feel comfortable with a stranger. This one was trending pear-shaped before it even got going.

I am many things, but I am not a quitter. I paid for this shoot, I need it for the experience (and for the photos for you, dear readers), so I’m doing the damn thing. I suggested some black lingerie to start and directed the model – whose name is Yara by the way, and it turns out she’s lovely – over to the only window in the room. It was now 4:30 PM on a completely overcast day in November, and there was a towering building just opposite the one we were looking out from, so you can imagine what pitiful, piddling light was making its way onto Yara, even with curtains tossed fully open. And it was only going to get dimmer by the minute.

I peered through the viewfinder and assessed the situation. Wide open at f/1.7, it’s already looking like ISO 800, maybe 1600. (If you don’t speak digital sensor light sensitivity, that means that the room had about eight times less light than I’d like.) This would normally annoy me, but I was so pre-annoyed by this point that I just cranked the ISO up and got over it. I was about to get started, when I remembered to ask about music – most models like to have something on while they 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 Yara, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.