Jessa works as a traveling model and reached out to me to see if I might be interested in working with her. I had recently worked with Vicki and suggested a black and white theme. I had a couple of shot ideas in mind but didn’t end up using any of them. Instead, the shoot turned out to be an incredibly collaborative experience with all of us contributing our ideas and making up stuff as we went along. We were having fun and the I didn’t have anyone booked immediately after, so this turned into quite a long shoot as we explored a whole variety of shots.
We wanted to contrast skin colors. It’s challenging to light such different skin tones, so for the most part I stuck with relatively bright high-key light.
You can click and image to open the gallery and view the full size image. There are several galleries if you scroll down the page.
I had envisioned a couple of shots that I knew would be difficult to do. But Jess does acro yoga and Vicki is an aerialist and has done some contortion in the past, so I knew they’d be up to giving it a try.
This first one with Vicki upsidedown took the longest to figure out. Jessa had done something similar before, but not as the base. It’s awkward to get into and we had some big laughs as we struggled to make it happen. I envisioned a tight shot taken high over Jessa’s right shoulder that would have captured both of their torso with a strong backlight to highlight their contours. But as you can imagine by looking at these images, this is a difficult pose to hold and the light really needed to be inch-perfect to look right. In terms of actualizing my vision, I would consider this a fail, but I got a couple of long shots that showcase their physicality.
This looks deceptively simple but takes some practice to get into. This was inspired by a dance performance I had seen. So I envisioned some movement with only two feet as a base instead of four. We were all getting a little tired, so I decided not to push them, but instead, keep it simple.
Jessa wanted to get a few bodyscape images. I love doing these. They can be tricky depending on your vision, but the kind of images below are pretty simple and didn’t take us long to do.
At the end of the shoot, we to a few minutes to capture a few portraits. They didn’t wear any makeup because we thought we focus more on figure studies. So these images look quite natural. And when you’re hanging out naked with someone for an afternoon, you develop a certain level of intimacy, so these look quite authentic. I edited a few different versions of the final image in black and white. Jessa is looking directly at you as the viewer in these ones and it’s a very engaging gaze.
