The light from the strobes shine down on our model from four points around her. Each meant to highlight a certain part of her body with one main one to the side in the front and high up.
"How about a smile? Give me a smile" Dave says to the young croatian woman. She is wearing a stylish red long sleeve shirt with a sewn in pattern on the front, a crimped skirt and a pair of shiny tall black high heeled boots. Very cool looking. The fan is on blowing her hair for extra effects.
"I'm from eastern europe. We don't know how to smile."
"Hmm. So what can we do?"
"You need to make me do something. Something wild or talk to me and make me laugh that way." The model continues to shift parts of her body just a little to give us a continuous stream of different poses.
Dave clicks away slowly occasionally stopping to preview the shots on the screen of his digital camera.
"Oh can I look? I need some of these pictures to build my portfolio." The class had agreed to give her one or two photos each because our photography teacher had suggested it. Even though she was a very good model, she had started late and didn't have a complete or up to date portfolio.
Dave was finished and sat down in his chair. The room went quiet and no one moved. The model just stood there waiting for someone to get up. Everyone in our group just sat there because they were either too afraid to get up and do something out of shyness or because they wanted to go last so that they could see what other people did to give them ideas for their own shoot. The model didn't care. Luba didn't want to be loved. "She just wants someone to shoot her" I said to the class. "So somebody shoot her!"
We all took turns taking shots with her until the models swapped rooms. The big haired Andrea came into our room with the white model background while our croatian went over to the black room which now had a hollywood lighting setup. Everyone was given a choice of which of which room they wanted to take pictures in.
I gave the sync chord adaptor to Elenita and started to make my way out of the studio to go to the other room. As I did so, Andrea's eyes followed me towards the door. I could read exactly what they were saying, "why aren't you staying to take my photos?" I was surprised at this but didn't think much of it. There's still another four or five student photographers waiting to take Andrea's photos with the rembrandt lighting set up and I only had six frames left on my roll of film. I preferred the hollywood lighting in the other room.
Our female teacher was probably the most enthusiastic of anyone in the class. Always pointing out something about the lighting, the background, the set in general, the way the model stood, moved, held and positioned themselves. It was non-stop comments that eventually started to annoy some of the students as in previous studio sessions during this course. I've never met anyone so into photography. It was a bit much I think for some but didn't bother me. She'd get excited about everything. Even the theory. The good thing was that she knew it. This way she could joke her way out of it by saying something like, "ok, I'll be quiet now." or "I'll stop talking now."
In one of the December issues of the local papers, one of my photos will be used in an ad. Once a month Salon Firouzi has a small blurb about their Yaletown shop and this time, they will be highlighting a friend who just started working there. They needed a headshot of her and I coincidentally happened to be there when this request came up. I didn't have any head shots of my friend on my film camera so I took the best shot I could with her small digital camera at her place nearby. The lighting in the shop was horrible for a her camera. Using some dark blue curtains as the background, I took a number of flash filled pictures which were all overexposed. Even with the exposure setting set at the lowest, the camera always put out the same light output unlike the flash of an slr. I took a bunch of these photos home and fixed them up on my computer. My friend isnt' that young any more so I got rid of some lines, added some more lip to her thin upper lip, blotched out some wrinkles and dark spots, whitened her teeth a bit and got rid of the excessive light on her skin from the flash. The final picture was completely different from the original one. It made her look younger having smooth and blemish free skin. Frank was happy with the results and quickly submitted it to the papers. My first soon to be published photo although it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. A plain ol headshot.
Last week I went to the last mandarin class. We had decided to go to a chinese restaurant downtown called the Snow Garden. It used to be the place to be because of the chef. That was some ten to twenty years ago. Tonight, last tuesday that is, the place was rather empty. Our small class of seven pupils sat at one table with one of the two instructors and her husband. The food was good and our instructors husband told us stories of his travels in china. He is a canadian born citizen who married the instructor from china and is now fluent in mandarin.
During our last two classes, we learned to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in mandarin. God was that embarassing. Then the instructors husband taught us another chinese song which he performed for us complete with chinese sound instruments. Little bamboo things which you hit together to make noises. I'll stick to playing with my guitar.