A Shoot on Venice Beach....

Yesterday after some rather successful meetings with Paul's Photo and our new product partners, Hoodman Inc, Glynn and I headed for Venice Beach where we had decided we were going to do a shoot with a young model named Jacqueline Grey. Jacqueline was a delight to work with and if you are a Californian photographer I would recommend her highly. Not all models are as willing to brave the cold as she was yesterday. I had to smooth over the goosebumps in PhotoShop!
We were later joined by our new friend and fellow photographer, Erin Manning. Erin's friend and video producer, Mike Welch also came along to capture the madness as it happened. So, look out for some video footage popping up somewhere that is highly incriminating and worthy of my best efforts to remove from the web.

Venice Beach has a rich diversity of potential images. There is, of course, the beach, but there are so many interesting buildings and their colourful facades. The people who inhabit this place are an eclectic mix, that's for sure. There are musicians, artists, shopkeepers, tourists, skaters, and even some everyday people. All we knew was that we were going to have a great shoot. We were a creative group on an interesting location with a lovely model. 

California was unusually cloudy yesterday, so the light was easy to work with and it offered us some different available light opportunities as well as off camera flash images. (Image right: Glynn Lavender) We started walking through the streets behind the beachfront shops, looking for colours and textures, as well as the most important thing - light. We found our share of colours and textures and the light was pretty much unchanging for most of the afternoon. It had set before we even noticed it warming up...which it didn't. That was ok. Glynn and I used some gels to create our own lighting effects with off camera flash.

After the shoot we all met at Erin's place for Mexican food, beer and an interview on video for Erin's ongoing video presentation on the net. It was all rather impromptu but we managed. Somehow. After all, Glynn and I aren't exactly known for our silence or inability to speak...We finally made it out alive at about 1 am. Hence the sleep in this morning. After going through our images from yesterday, we finally hit the hay around 3 am, and we aren't as young as we used to be.
This morning found us Lightrooming our shoots and loading images to our Facebook pages ad infinitum. It was a great day yesterday. It was Glynn's first international shoot, although he has been here many times. It was my first California Girl on Venice Beach shoot. Now there's a great box to tick if ever there was one!