A brief look into my Twitter feed the other evening found a message by model Monica Wong saying she was free the next day for a photoshoot, and was anybody interested? Brilliant, I was just going to do a casting for a test shoot! A few quick texts back and forth, and we were set.
Given the very short notice, our original plan was to work outside, but I happened to be walking past our local gastro-pub, “The Idle Hour” that night (brilliant food and atmosphere, highly recommended) and I remembered that they have a beautiful upstairs lounge. A quick word with Janga, the very friendly manager, and we were set (yay, no freezing outdoors!).
Monica and I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with a theme for our shoot, so we went with something simple: “stood up on a date” (Monica made sure I knew that she’s never actually been stood up on a date :-) She wore the classic little black dress, did her own hair and makeup “date style”, and we ran through a few scenarios to show her range. She was a genuine pleasure to work with!
For the technical geeks, the key light was a gridded 70cm beauty dish on a 500J monobloc set to give f/5.6-f/8. Fill light was ambient (1/60 @ ISO250) plus another 500J monobloc bounced off the ceiling/walls to bring up the room to f/2.8 (it was pretty dark where there was no sun. The bounced light gave quite a purple light due to the colour of the room, but I liked the look.
