Much of my energy so far this year is going into my real job... I have a fairly large project going which involves managing staff from four offices in two states, and while it's a good client to work with, it's also a demanding one. As a result I didn't do my first shoot (with a model) until early March this year, and have not been posting here nearly as often as usual.
But things are slowly coming under control as I get more people trained up on the project and can delegate more work. And it does mean I'm in San Francisco once or twice a month. At one time I'd had a waiting list of models there, but then worked on things other places for a couple of years, so have had to rebuild that list. Things are moving now on that front as well.
After the shoot with Iona Lynn in March, I've made it a point to schedule one shoot each subsequent trip. It's been an evening and weekend thing, which is why I'm keeping it simple. But if anything, it's more important than ever to shoot now, to exercise the creative side of the brain and balance the rational demands of Monday through Friday.
The second shoot was a fortuitous bit of chance. I had an inquiry about reliable Bay Area models from another photographer, someone I've never met but have encountered frequently in various forums over the years. He does classic fine art nudes, and was planning a west coast visit. So that sent me off to check on a few models, see what they were up to.
One person I'd lost track of was Hana, who I'd had a memorable shoot with in 2005. She was gone from the site I'd found her on then, later I learned she'd taken a sabbatical from modeling, and she had just recently returned. So this time I found her on MM, and of course contacted her immediately, and within hours we had another shoot scheduled. It happened within days.
We shot at an East Bay location, one I've used before, but in a part of it I hadn't explored yet. It started off as almost a fashion shoot, if in a surreal setting, and ended with nudes. We could hear people for much of the time, but rarely saw any, and were never interrupted when it mattered. It was almost dark when we returned to the car.
The next shoots happened just a week or so ago. I'd been talking to Alea off and on for nearly a year, and it seemed we were just never in the same city at the same time. This time I checked with her, and she'd just returned from travel. Again, we were able to schedule a shoot fairly quickly.
That's her at the top of the post, with the bright red hair. As so often happens, we talked as much as we shot, and then talked for hours more after we shot... ending with a midnight burrito in the Mission District. The images took a few days to grow on me, but I've used several of them now in various venues. It seems to have been a successful shoot, and I certainly enjoyed the evening.
A couple of days later, I had three hours to fill between time in a financial district office and a South of Market exhibit opening. So I posted a casting call for a just-for-fun shoot, and had a response within an hour. It turned out to be her first shoot, so I spent part of it teaching. Kind of fun though, since there was zero pressure, the photos weren't really for anything beyond helping her start a portfolio.
Next: Chicago next week, for the first time in perhaps five months, maybe the longest I've been away from there in years. Then back to San Francisco in May, at least once and probably twice, followed almost immediately by a swing up the Oregon coast (tacked on the back end of a Crescent City meeting). I've already booked a shoot for Oregon, and have a tentative one in Chicago, although I haven't thought much about the San Francisco part yet. I have a agreement in principle to shootn there soon with someone who has interested me for a while, but she's on travel right now and it's not yet clear if she'll return in time for this trip. So if not this time, then next time.
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