I met Jana online. It was through a casting call. I didn't know if we would be a good fit to work together and I'm sure she felt the same way. A simple solution was to hire her for a couple hours on a weekend, shoot some images around downtown, and get to know each other. It would also give me time to describe what we were looking for in the book, in more detail.
Jana was a student at UT Austin at the time. I was a 54 year old photographer looking for a model. That's an odd dynamic unless you are going through an agency.
On the scheduled day Jana showed up with a friend in tow. Another student from UT. A very pleasant and capable looking woman. Having the "chaperone" there put everyone at ease. We spent a couple of hours walking through downtown photographing and then we put together a quick, fun shoot in a coffee shop that's no longer there on Congress Ave. The images were great and by the end of the day Jana felt comfortable saying, "yes" to the project. And that's great because we were able to use images of her throughout the book to illustrate technical stuff.
It's important to say that she was paid standard fees for every day that we worked together. No favors asked. Most of the time we were joined on shoots by my long time assistant, Amy. It was a comfortable crew.
On our first shoot I showed up with my typical one camera and one lens inventory of gear. No flashes. No modifiers or reflectors. I knew we'd find more than enough open shade in which to make flattering images. The camera was a Canon 5D mk2 and the lens was Canon's very nice EF 100mm f2.0.
This is a random image shot in an alley way between two buildings. A nice, bright, late afternoon alley way next to a chic, high rise residential tower. Not a gloomy, bleak looking alley from a dystopian movie set.
It was just another day in the flow of a photography career. Putting books together is like planning a couple dozen days of shoots based around stuff that I wrote down in chapters. Illustrating concepts to accompany the writing was a primary way of selling books.
That book is now quite dated. Progress in LED lighting technology advanced at an amazing pace over the last 15 years. And LEDs are so ubiquitous now that revising the book doesn't make any sense at all. But I'm happy to say that the images Jana and I made together still look good.
She is now a very successful advertising executive. Last time we spoke she was in NYC. But I think she was heading to the west coast. You meet the most fun people sometimes when you have a project that needs humans.
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