Drinks and food at the airport onroute to frankfurt!!!!

My first New York shoot in Timesquare

 I have finally had time to finish retouching my first photo shoot in New york. We shot this on the 4th of July in Time Square. We had planned to shoot on the 3rd of July , but as we all arrived at Time Square , so did a massive thunder and lightning storm. It pissed down so badly that we had to pospone the shoot for the following day.

Pavel was our russian male model from OnRequest models .
Rachele our Chicago born female model from Woman Direct Model agency had a big romantic day planned with her boyfriend for the 4th of July holiday. But cancelled her holiday to shoot with me as it was my last day in New York.  Thank you Rachele and Pavel. It was amazing to work with such experienced models, this was just my first shoot and Im really excited to shoot some more stuff. tick tock tick tock ... counting down the weeks until we get our O-1 American visa's !

Not only did I shoot this story but i also filmed awesome little video clips of Pavel skating through Soho and the whole adventure in Time Square. Mark Sherman is going to be editing the video for me as soon as he gets a chance.. which will hopefully be soon ...   :)

 

Backstage on Indulge mag shoot

Being very well traveled has given me the opportunity to get inspired by the way international industry people work and think , to shoot in various cities around the world and to work with international crew and models.

When I first arrived in Dubai from Cape Town, I would put extra effort into color checking all my magazine editorials, perfecting light and spending a long time shooting to get the perfect shot. This went on for a while, until mags got upset that I wanted color proofs as a lot of them didn't really care what the color of the shoot looked like, clients wanted more shots in a day to save money and i had less time to perfect lights, clients also wanted triple the amount of retouched shots so most of my time got taken up by retouching... I ended up spending all day shooting and all night retouching and sometimes dropping off DVDs for clients at 3 am for morning deadlines .. Then something happened ... the dubai money flu hit me. It hits everyone, its all about the money. So shooting became about finishing the shoot as quick as possible , and getting the money. I lost my passion for photography completely , i had no time to shoot anything for myself . i took on so much work that i didnt have free time for anything. Working weekends, working day and night ... any free time went to either playing with our son so that he doesnt forget that im his mom or falling a sleep on the couch..

Although the hectic work times haven't changed , i have got my candy shooting mojo back. Since my latest trip to LA and NY in search of an agent I have been over motivated to get my shit together, keeping the idea in my head that every shoot I do no matter how big or small is the most important shoot of my life. Because now i have something to work towards again. Impressing NY clients. Its a lot of extra work, instead of just arriving on set and shooting, Im now pre-planning lighting,  researching and conceptualizing to make sure that the shoot is perfect.

The last 2 days I shot an editorial for Indulge magazine, and yesterday i shot a editorial for Cosmo mag.  Both went great. Here attached below are the backstage shots for indulge shot by Mark Sherman
We were working at Crispin's studio - Action Filmz in Al Quoz, Dubai. He also supplied all the awesome lighting equipment which we used as props as well as for the actual lighting