A girl I knew in high school (Japan) is in town working on a TV production. The wonders of Facebook brought us back together and it turns out she and another woman from the show wanted to do some modeling. They have an idea for a more complex shoot coming up. But, I've been hankering to just keep shooting every weekend and they were down with doing some impromptu shooting. An empty bluish (more like teal I suppose) room provided our backdrop as we just put on some music and started shooting.

Started with artificial lights and ended with natural light. Natural light just envelopes the body and falls off beautifully. Although I shoot digital regularly, I've been almost exclusively shooting film for these personal shoots. However, the darkness of this room simply precluded shooting film (even at f1.4). The Fuji S5 I was using has a film-like grain structure at high-iso's.

I think I have ANTM to thank for Lise and Megumi's enthusiam to shoot. If you can't figure out the acronym then you are a better person than I for not gluing yourself to the TV (someone actually said to me last week - "hey do you watch A.N.T.M.?" - I didn't know what they were talking about at first).

The subjects of this shoot are warm weather people (from the west coast and farther into the warm Pacific). So, the bone chilling cold this weekend wasn't helping our options for shooting in natural light. But, we did eventually get outside (if briefly). I actually had my first Hasselblad mechanical failure this time; the film never caught the winding number so I wound half-way through the roll before I was sure I wasting the film. It worked on the next roll no problem; not sure what went wrong.

As I was rolling the 120 I was reminded of Andrew Hetherington telling me how his new assistants don't know how to load film. I would mock their lack of knowledge, but sad to say, it really isn't requisite knowledge anymore. It would be like a recording engineer mocking me for not knowing how to splice audio-tape. I know the theory, but I've never had to do it in practice (and thank goodness for that). I am a product of the digital-audio age. But, I still like film. Soon, soon... I will be outdoors again shooting 120 color negative film and getting that beautiful, textured, nuanced look of film.

Had great fun. Still learning about shooting female subjects. The ever present battle is trying to overcome my sense of beauty and encapsulate the subject's true beauty. A happy problem for now.