Meet Heather, a visiting model from Toronto.  You can also see a couple of additional pictures of Heather on my String Thing Project page.

Let me repeat a couple of lessons I've highlighted on some of my older pages:

Photographers -- Get yourself a web site.  Heather had a good idea of my style & abilities before she even contacted me.  She already had a good idea of what we'd be doing before she showed up.  She also saw that I've worked with other models she knows.

Remember -- models talk with each other.  When Heather was planning her trip, she contacted Tatyana for some suggestions of photographers in the area who would be good to work with.  Treat all you models well, and you will be rewarded.  Traveling models get to work with a variety of photographers with a large range of skills & abilities.  For the most part, the skills & abilities aren't too important to models, but they will remember the photographers who treat them with respect and who are fun to work with.  I might have a good day during a sitting, and I may even have a bad day, but it is my objective that at the end of the sitting, the model & I should be interested & motivated to work together again.  After all, I do this for fun.

Heather is a terrific model -- one of the best I've had the pleasure to photograph.  She is terrifically friendly & buoyant -- she's a lot of fun to be around.  She is all natural in front of the camera.

And look at her -- she is gorgeous!  More importantly, she has a terrific range of looks -- she's a high fashion supermodel and the girl next door.  She looks like your mother years before you were born.  She takes direction easily and can expand upon your concepts.  She has a lovely face that is quite capable of expressing a wide range of emotions.  I would love to work with her again -- if only she wasn't 2500 miles away!

We barely were able to make a connection -- for much of her trip to this area, I was out of town -- we had our sitting together on the day after I returned.  I have to admit that I was a bit distracted by that -- I was still catching up on mail & chores.  I hate being distracted during a sitting.  And I would have liked spending a bit more time before the sitting thinking about when we'd do together.  But maybe this was a good thing -- I had few preconceived notions about our sitting -- we just got together and let the shutter fly.

Here are some more pictures of Heather:

I picked Heather up from a sitting with another area photographer (there are lots of photographers both here in the South Bay and up in San Francisco).  We had a chance to get to know each other on the short drive to my house & studio.  I think it was during this trip that I conceived the idea of doing some unclothed portraits of Heather.  And as it turns out, Heather was terrific at this.  We avoided any classic glamour or art poses, and we just had a good time talking with each other, being ourselves, and enjoying each other's company.  I could swear that I forgot she was nude (but I would be lying).

The lighting was nice -- I'm really enjoying this kind of light; it makes the skin look like it's glowing.  So we moved on to some expressive shadow pictures.  

Can you tell that I like shadows?  What better way to give depth to photos?

Some more shadows:

I hope you are getting a sense of Heather's great range of expression.

We finished our sitting with variations of this setup.