the everything is love shoot.

marla and aura were having a little love fest for one another in the comments of photos of each other and watching it i had possibly the greatest idea ever. What if we take marla singer, and we take aura and we put them together under the same light?

I suggested it and both were on board. It wasn’t easy to schedule for three busy people and waiting for it was killer. they arrived after a joint shopping trip during which they matched up their underwear, which i thought was a nice touch. We made sure we were amply stocked for wine and foodstuffs and returned to the den of sin.

earlier in the week i picked up my first light meter. I’ve never been much for precision but the idea of measuring light seems so exotic and interesting i couldn’t resist. I spend most of the week measuring the EV differences between one end of my curtains and the other. Fascinating stuff.

So I had this concept, as far as me and concepts go, of having them together and using a red gel on the background to give this brothel/erotic feeling. Given the space constraints of my tiny place thats a task and a half. I spent probably two hours trying to get the lights right while the girls sat around talking and drinking wine. after numerous technical problems with the meter (and my cabling for my pocket wizards) I gave up on the gel and put the meter down. Theres no point in having two amazing women available if you’re going to spend the entire time working out your lights.

I was pretty down at that point. I really wanted to use this shoot to learn more about gelling backgrounds and my recent addition of hair lights with grid spots seemed like it was going to be a deadly combo, but you’ve got to roll with it when its happening and what i learnt is gear gets in the way sometimes. Light meters are for learning on your own, or staged shoots where its pre-planned, and my shoots tend to just grow organically.

i won’t think about how that meter is 1/4 of the cost of the new lens i want.

within moments of shooting, while i was still doing test shots for light they were full into it and giving me more than i could handle.

you never know what you might get when you put two people together. it may seem like it will be amazing but often it fizzles as they try to relate to one another. I’ve watched painfully as it happens wishing for it to be over. this time though, they really interacted together amazingly and there were probably more great shots than i will have time to process. these are the sorts of problems one wants to have.

aside from that, it was just fun to hang with two aweosome people for a night.

i’m not sure i will ever be able to translate the fluid, moving nature of the photos i want to capture into the correct light. the two seem opposed sometimes, and when you catch exactly the right shot it seems like pure chance. i want to lessen that random element and yet keep the open ended nature. its something that will require many more years of work to achieve.

the first shot in the above slideshow seems nearly perfect light wise and it was a real eye opener for me. I saw clearly for the first time flaws in my light when comparing to that image and now the work begins to understand why they are different and how to get to producing that quality of light regularly and predictably.