colors

Just a couple of days after the shoot with Beth, I was on an airplane to Chicago. Mostly it was a business trip, and a fairly full one; but it overlapped two weekends, and I'd scheduled a couple of shoots on the logic that it wasn't going to be getting any warmer in the Midwest for a while, and (hopefully) I wouldn't need to be back there for a few months. So it was last chance til spring to work through the backlog.

The first shoot was an unusual one; a model from Milwaukee, a newbie not on any of the standard sites yet, who found me through, I think, this blog. I rarely take shoots from newbies anymore, unless there's something unique or unusual about them. This one qualified, she was bald... not only bald, but hairless. No eyebrows, no hair anywhere.

Unfortunately, she wasn't ready for nudity, it was mostly a lingerie shoot. I booked it for early Sunday morning, only 12 hours after I'd gotten off the plane. Really it was a tune-up for other things later in the trip.

Most of the action was on the second weekend. Saturday was a shoot with Gia Maze, that's her in the photo above. At the time of the shoot she was three weeks away from a bodybuilding competition, pretty much in peak shape. She's a pleasure to work with, a very clear communicator, prompt, zero drama. For this one it was back to my post-industrial concept, a little more fitting under the circumstances. Normally those are black and white, but I just couldn't turn off the colors, the spectacular ink and the mane of red hair.

The intent had been to do another shoot on Sunday with an old friend, but she's dealing with some fairly serious health issues recently. We were both disappointed, but decided to wait a while to shoot, possibly when she's on the west coast this winter. Better to be safe. We'd just shot a couple of months earlier, so really all we were losing was a chance to take advantage of the fall colors, which were less than optimal this year.

I'd expected to be done at that point, but one more shoot fortuitously came together before the end of the trip, just barely. More on that a little later.