Frustrating shoot

One of our first attempts at multiple models shoot today, due to a series of confusions, mess ups, and chance, it turned out to be one of the most frustrating shoots ever.

The fact that we got as many nice photos as we did is only due to Mariko and Chizuko's awesome sense of color and style and Ned's creativity and talent.


While typing this I realized another frustrating thing.

It's really hard and annoying to write about something without giving any information about what actually went on. Ever since my big break up and especially since meeting Ned and moving to NY, I'm really trying hard ot be as open and honest in both public and private communication. It helps that i don't have a job right now or dealing with my family (which is the people that I lie to the most...).

I don't want to burn any bridges or get on bad terns with the people involved in this, so, I have to "write around things" which make me feel pretty bad about myself on top of everything else.

Damn, this interact with so many other family related things that I already told my dad I'm not going to write about. I feel like I'm being shrunk to myself at 12 years old, being anxious about my mom being angry with me.

Aftershoot blues

I'm so tried, we had an evening shoot tonight and one yesterday. it's 4:00 AM and I just finished editing my photos, editing Ned's photo with him, and making chilly before the beans we
sprouted goes bad. For the past few days (weeks?) I feel like all I want is to sleep all the time. I'm not sure if it's allergies, still getting over being sick or just stress and the weird dreams I've been having lately.

I'm happy with the photo I took though.

I hate feeling like I'm not doing everything I want, I feel like I'm missing opportunities and messing up stuff by not keeping in touch with people and follow things though.

I'm not sure if it's really the case or if that's just a feeling, I don't know if I'm really messing up or not.

I'm just so tired of feeling tired, and hate feeling so aimless and unfocused.

Severine

Ned and I haven't shot in about a month and a half, Ned was sick, we were tired, then sad with his dad's cancer news and other things, it's winter, it's cold, we were busy with other things.

We've seen Severine's Model mayhem page a while ago, and both liked her style and photo personality, Ned wrote her an e-mail and said we'd love to shoot with her if she ever comes to NY. Then, a couple of weeks ago, she wrote back to say she's going to be in New York for a week and would love to shoot with us.

Ned and I were pretty nervous about this, we both felt unpracticed in taking pictures and also, unprepered, we decided ot not have hair, make up or wardrobe for this one and to just shoot intuativly, without any type of concept or idea.

So the day started sort of slow, as Ned was adjusting the lights and figuring out while shooting what are better angles, I was very tired and feeling sort of sick and upset all day, which meant I couldn't really take any charge as far as outfits goes, Ned had to deal with everyting on his own and I felt like a usless lump.

Severine on her side, was really nice but also very closed, she felt very guarded and dignified, I liked her strangth but it felt somewhat hard to communicate, She was pretty shocked when Ned asked her to shoot without any make up on, and then also made her wet her hair and let it frizz as it naturally wants to and not just be straight like she's used to wear it all the time, I had to go out and get a blowdryer so she can strighten it before the shoot.
We talked about how we all see ourselves in different ways and always want to look like different people then ourselves. Both me and Ned agreed that her hair looks beautiful when it's curly, it actually looks like a lion's mane, but she wasn't intierly convinced.

When she was drying her hair in the bathroom, I fall asleep, I only slept for about 10 minutes, but when she came out I felt a lot more refreshed and much more awake. I looked into my camera and were shocked to discover I took 174 pictures! I felt like I was doing nothing all day...
Andthen when I downloaded them I was even more amazed at how the pictures came out. I really love what I shot. I think it's my favorite photos that I took of a girl that isn't me.

We are shooting again tomorrow and I'm going ot try and use Ned's lens and not my own, I'm ciourious to see how those would come out.

Shoot - Sierra

The first shoot we had in a while with an independent model who doesn't belong to an agency.

The experience of shooting a models is always surprising and fun for me. I always somehow expect them to "act like a model" which is my mind, I guess based on TV and movies, is somewhere between stupid and nasty - I'm not sure how I got so prejudgist, maybe it's jealousy or mistrust in beautiful people. Non of the models I've met were either stupid or nasty so far.

This girl was so awesome, she was funny and creative and just really fun to be around. She brought such great energy to the shoot.

Never Again!

A couple of weeks ago Ned and I saw this ad pasted on a light past in Wiliamsburg. Someone was looking for couples of all ages \ genders \ sexual preferences to kiss to a camera then was going to composite the footage together to make a short film. I'm not quite sure why I answered this ad, maybe because though my acting skills are non existing I still wanted to be in a movie, maybe because the phrasing was so endearing, maybe because it looked like a good promotion to the Ned and Aya enterprise... however, i did wrote back, and the guy who was making the movie wrote back, and we meet last Wednesday to talk about the shoot.



It turned out this was some film students working on a really cool school assignment to which the school gave budget and invested in, he was planning to shoot 5 couples in different spots in Williamsburg and said he had 6 minute of film for each couple. I though that meant about 1/2 hour to an hour and so agreed to take part. It was all exciting and the guy was really sweet.

My first sign of warning should have been the next line "I scheduled you two for 7:00 AM on Saturday. But I didn't yield to the warning and had a very positive feel about the whole thing.

Of Saturday, I looked at the weather report and for the time of the shoot, it said 25F and feels like 13. I wrote the guy to ask him if he still wants to shoot and he said yes. So I said yes, thinking that we'll do it quick then go back to sleep (or go to sleep at all actually, since the only way I'll be up at 7:00 AM is by not going to sleep till then).

Me and Ned got out of the house at 6:40 and were in the playground at 7:50, theres' nobody there. We walked around to keep warm, it's fucking freezing, we go around the block a couple of times, check the other playground, on the other side of the street, there are a few people out, walking around, their breath fuming in the chill. After 20 minutes we walk away, go to Aldo's for breakfast, coffee and defrosting and head back home.

When we get in there are 5 unanswered calls on my phone and as I sit down it's ringing again, it's some girl from the film and she's wondering where we are, so, we dress again, this time I add long underwear and walk, again, to where the shoot it supposed to take place. There are 4 people in, the director who we have meet, a camera guy and 2 other people, everyone's wearing hats coats and gloves and freezing.

As it turned out, 6 minutes of film doesn't mean 6 minutes of consecutive filming, No, the director shoot 2 seconds then stops then change tripod then figure out the light, then we wait for the clouds to go away and shoot again, from a different direction doing something different with the arm. We don't get off the bench cause we need to keep the same place. And it just getting colder and colder. Even with the big dawn jacket, and the long underwear and the motorcycle gloves, I'm getting colder and colder, Ned's even worst off, since he's wearing sneakers and a less warm hat, his lips are turning purple. The whole thing takes about 2 hours, we get some coffee at a strange Spanish chicken restaurant when the crew is changing hte film in the camera.

Eventually they run out of film and we take off.

In bed trying to defrost later, we try to figure out why neither of us said anything or just left. And we can't really understand our reaction, was in because we felt sorry for the crew, or because we didn't want to mess it up, or simply not wanting to be th first pussy to break down. Somehow I assume that just like when we are shooting and take responsibility for the model's comfort and take care of everything, I'll be taken care of when someone's shooting me. I make lists of everything this guy did wrong and how he could have do better, I'm angry with the director but even more then that, angry with myself for not speaking up.

This wasn't just 2 stupid hours, we were asleep all day, woke up for a few hours to eat and meet friends and went back to sleep. Still filling a strange numbness in the tip of my fingers and a strange coldness inside.

What a stupid reason to loose an entire weekend! Never again!

Brissi Fashion Shoot

Before I met Ned I never knew what a fashion shoot involved, working in graphic design I did know part of the computer graphic manipulation a photo can endure to make it magazine presentable, but I do find that following the whole process of fashion photography to be both fascinating and a little depressing. The amount of effort that go into making a model look beautiful on a photo and all that it involve and the way, that looking at fashion photographs sometimes makes me feel inadequate, not beautiful, tall, thin, young enough.

Even though, since now I'm a part of this process, I do feel a lot less incline to want to look like those girls in magazines, and I think that being on a fashion photography set and following the whole process could be an important part of curing eating disorder as well as just making non-model women feel better about themselves.

So, I thought I would share some of this process, or at least my view of this experience, and how we get from wanting to do a shoot to an end product - a fashion story.



Before we even start any shoot, we sit around talk and think, usually, this will start with both me and Ned just wondering aimlessly around the internet looking for a visual starting point. In this specific shoot, I was looking on some extremely contrasty black and white images that were really beautiful to me, which led me to think of the art of aubrey beardsley, especially the illustrations he did to Oscar Wilde's Salome. I looked at some photos, talked to Ned and we realized that what's interesting to us about those images is the amount of black vs. white and also the amount of details vs. flat plain surfaces. We also talked about the story of Salome and the power play of women and men, money and sex and objective and subjective within the frame of the story and photography.

Then we contact our stylist, and make up artist, it turns out that our usual hair stylist is not available, but the case is shorty, though pretty stressfully get resolved because the make up artist have a friend - work buddy that can fill in. Next we contacted a couple of model agencies we work with to see who's in town and free to test with us. We talk to the booker who wants to send over a girl we shot with in the past, which we thought would be perfect for this shoot and who needed some more elegant and womanly photos for her book, her style up until now was very girly and cute and the agency is trying to expand her abilities and type of projects she's getting.

After talking to the crew and making sure everyone's in the studio in time, start the worse part of the project - the cleaning of the studio... Since we live and work here and since my craft and art is really messy, and since we were in a sort of messed up period in life anyway, it took about 2 days to make enough room in here for a shoot... It's a good thing cause it makes me throw out a lot of crap I don't need and to finally clean my desk remembering half tended projects and things I didn't take care of.

The night before a shoot, we always plan to goto sleep early, but somehow between cleanup and setting the lights and trying to finish a whole bunch of things, we go to sleep really late. In this evening, we found ourselves going out to the only open late Williamsburg spot which is a pretty crappy bagel store. We go over some of the images we found as inspiration and talk about the shoot again making sure we know what we want out of this. I think one of the biggest challenges, for me, is to have a plan, or an idea and then not get fixated on it, so that I have guild lines but not an entire script written down. It's hard because unlike painting which is what I'm more used to doing, photography involves a lot of people each with their own vision which is often more surprising and interesting then mine, and letting people get their own say in the process, makes the photos more rich and interesting then just what I had in mind.

Also, since Ned's the photographer and I'm somewhere between an art director and an assistant, I have a lot of work to do before and after the shoot but in the actual day I sometimes feel a little redundant, so it's a bit of a challenge for me to just sit back and let people do their jobs.

We eventually went to sleep at about 5:30 that day, knowing we need to get up at 10:30, for people to come in at noon.

At noon, the hair and make up crew get here, they are setting up their equipment, and then the stylist gets here, she unpack and we have first look at the outfits, usually, I like doing that a couple of days before the shoot, but it just didn't work this time. So as she unpack, I get to finally see them, she really got the colors and shapes that I wanted, but suddenly this shoot get a whole new layer of, I don't know - German film noir?! I'm not quite sure what to call it, she was trying to find more contemporary pieces but somehow the vintage stuff just came popping up. We talk about different combinations and how it would look, Ned set the set paper and start setting up the lights.

I go out to get some shoot food because it's going to be a long day, when I get back the model is in and already being worked on for hair and make up, while the stylist is deciding what to go with first.

The first hair and make up set is the most frustrating time in a shoot for me, I just want things to start already and to see how everything looks together, but there's about 2 hours of work before even the first photo is being shot! I don't wear makeup myself, and the most complicated thing I do to my hair is braid it so it's out of the way, I've never really learned how to blow dry or curl or put eyeliner and concealer, I'm not even sure what all those tools and paints and chemical do, so the work of the hair and make up people always seem like magic to me, I love looking at how they work and the way they can transform a face to look like something very different then how it looked before.



Eventually, at 3:00, we start shooting. I don't know if it's all fashion sets, but when we shoot the 2 first outfits always take a really long time and usually yield the less exciting photos, it takes time for the model to loose up and feel good about herself and for Ned to take charge and direct her more and for everyone on set to really get into the pace of working.

Every change in make up and hair takes about half an hour to an hour, in some outfits, we keep the make up and just do touch-ups and change things very subtly, This hair stylist is really good and were able to make beautifully constructed hair looks free and loose, it's funny to realize how many pins it take to hold all those hairs in place!



We change to a different outfits, some of them works right away, on some Ned doesn't like parts of it and change, it's hard to try and make everyone happy - the model, the photographer, the stylist, AND make sure we get the good shots, sometimes even though I know something doesn't work, I will let it get shot for a while and then ask to try it on without the jacket, or with a lighter lipstick, just so that the crew doesn't feel criticized or let down, we are really lucky to work with a group of people who are really committed to what they do, and so we have a full day to shoot in which we know everyone will stay for as long as they can, which leaves time to experiment and try things that might or might not work.

I think we shot 6 outfits in this day, which is pretty good, but not an amazing amount, toward the last one, we all get tired and we decide to stop even though there was at least one that we could have shot.

Ned's camera is connected to his computer so that as the shoot goes, we can look on the screen and see the photos, it's a really great way to see what looks great and what isn't, usually, at least one person (which is generally me) will sit at the monitor, check the focus and crops, and whether anything need to be changed.

After everyone pack their stuff and leave, at about 9:00 Ned and me and the stylist sit for a bit, then go out for coffee and cake for a bit of rest and trying to plan for a shoot next week (though we are all too tired and distracted) Ned and me go back to the studio and start editing.



There are a little over 500 photos! we are trying to form this to a possible fashion Editorial, which means about 8-15 photos, sometimes less, and a couple of closeups for the hair and make up crew, that means giving up on so many amazing shots! we have to flip our minds from being really positive, excited and supportive about the photos, to being really critical and negative, or else we'll keep more then half of the images...

When editing the photos, it's not just about getting the best few, but also make sure that they are cohesive and show progression, sometimes wonderful shots got rejected cause they don't match the feel of the other pictures or because there's another great shot of the same outfit. We narrow it down to I think 14 photos, look at the clock and see it's 4:00 AM.

Over the next few days Ned will retouch and color correct the images. He's really awesome with photoshop and works very fast, but it will still take about 2-4 days to finish everything.

It's really amazing to realize how, even though we started with a really beautiful, young, skinny talented model, it still takes so much time and effort from a whole group of people to make the shot looks so damn perfect.

Shoot Today

I'm still sick, it's not as bad, but still, not 100% OK, I'm coughing and I get tired really fast, it sucks! I just need to rest every now and then and I can't work or do as much as I want to and usually able to.

I especially felt it yesterday and today while we were shooting. Usually, I'm really energetic and positive and taking care of a lot of different things, but today it was really hard to both make the model feel comfortable, shoot some snapshots and look at the monitor to make sure Ned's photos are in focus and that everything looks great.

I mainly focused on the model, but I'm still pretty happy with some of the photos I took.

Shoot today

Me and Ned had a bit of a fight last night, he fall asleep and I stayed up and
were sad and upset. I only had about 3 hours of sleep before having to wake up at 9:00 to get ready for the shoot and start. I was really really tired all day and didn't feel like doing anything aside of going back to sleep. At night, I wrote Ned an angry e-mail, that was the only way I could think of to express my feelings and not waking him up so he'll be more or less functional in the shoot. He read it this morning and so, he was sad and upset as well.

We didn't have time to talk till after the shoot was over, by which time we were both really tired and there was not a lot to say anyway.
The upside of being so tired and sad is that I was a lot less concern with being nice and so it was much easier to just flat out tell the hair, make up and stylist what I wanted and get things going my way.

Even with the tiredness and sadness, the photos came out really beautiful.

A story about a skirt

A while ago, Ned and I were shooting for a fashion designer, her Name's Emily and she's an artist and a designer. She designed 2 beautiful Jackets, one very natural looking and the other, metallic and shiny. She said she'll bring some jumpsuits for the bottom, but we wanted to get some stuff, and the day before the shoot, I went to the Salvation Army store and bought a really nice mid length suede skirt, which I thought would look nice with the natural looking jacket.

Coming home and putting the skirt on the rack, I saw found a really wonderful find, It turned out it was an Isaac Mizrahi Leather skirt.

We never got to used it in the shoot, but I decided to keep the skirt for myself. Somehow, though it was beautifully made and very nice to touch, I only wore it once, it was a little too big and didn't look that great on me. So it set in the closet for a while, and seem would go on doing so until spring cleaning when I'll take it back to the Salvation army store.

However, a couple of day's ago I got an e-mail through Etsy, someone asked is I can make a traveler art kit from leather, and later that day, I remembered the skirt, so 2 days later, and the skirt is reincarnated as a nice folder for sketchbooks and pencils.

I have a bit of a problem using animal products for crafts, like leather, I love working with it, but feels it's immoral, using reclaim leather makes me feel a little better about it.