Lily is completely new to modeling, so the tests I shot with her last week are the first photos in her book. Apart from her, every other person the modeling agencies wanted to send me over the past few days was Asian. Since my previous two shoots were with a half-Thai and a half-Chinese model, this time I chose someone with a completely different look.

Soon there may be no white models here at all. Getting into Thailand is still difficult, so nobody knows when people from abroad will start flying in again. Perhaps things will begin moving in September, but in theory many models were already supposed to arrive a month ago, and in the end it proved impossible.

I suspected Lily had no experience because her composite consisted entirely of Polaroids, but I didn’t ask the booker for details. Posing ability and the number of shoots someone has done don’t always go hand in hand anyway. Lily is 179 cm tall and 14 years old, which explains the lack of previous shoots.

So Lily is starting fairly young, although it’s definitely nothing unusual. In fact, one of my more popular photos, shot years ago in Poland, shows a model with her bangs covering half her face. She was the same age.

International contracts are usually closer to the age of 16, though. Paris, for example, requires models to be at least 16 to take part in fashion shows, and apparently this has actually been enforced for some time, so younger models fly to Asia instead. That means Japan more often than Thailand. I’d been photographing only adult models for a very long time by this point.

When a model starts very young, she sometimes travels to a contract with a parent. Lily has lived in Thailand for seven years, so this isn’t an international contract for her and she didn’t have to fly anywhere.

Savage Black studio backdrop

For the shoot with Lily, I used a black paper backdrop to get an effect similar to the previous session without having to darken the background in post. I had only just written about the changes in my photography, one of which was returning to studio backdrops so I could shoot full-length images. The darkest gray backdrop wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I ended up with black. The roll measures 2.2 × 11 m, and I also explained previously why I chose that particular width. The shoot with Lily was therefore my first in a long time on Savage Black, and I’ll probably use it for many more photos. I did plenty of shoots on this type of backdrop in the past, but with different modifiers.

This was also my third shoot with the 150 cm umbrella. I don’t know why I insisted on forcing it into the part of the room with less space this time. I should have tried placing it where I normally put softboxes and the beauty dish—on the opposite side. Occasionally a model says she prefers her left or right profile and I try to accommodate that, but it’s rare, and in this case it made no difference.

The shoot confirmed my belief that the perfect black for me would be slightly lighter. Since no such shade exists, I use what’s available. I’ll change the setups a little for future shoots—for example, I’d prefer the floor to be more brightly lit, but with a very low ceiling that isn’t always possible.

Shadows on the backdrop

When photographing only part of a person, without the floor in frame, black backdrops cause no problems because you can light them however you like. In shots like these, you usually don’t want the subject casting a shadow on the background, so a light aimed directly at the backdrop solves the problem without creating any complications. There’s no need to worry about the shadows disappearing—in fact, that’s an advantage. 

With full-length photos, the kind of lighting used for portraits generally doesn’t work. The model’s shadows are an important part of the image. With a gray backdrop, everything receives at least some light, even when I use only one lamp. That isn’t true with black. If the light doesn’t come partly from above and instead comes only from the side, the floor will be almost completely black. That’s why I had previously chosen a lighter shade instead of going straight to black.

I’ll probably shoot tests with another model in a few days. This time she may be fully Thai rather than mixed. That’s all for now; below is a video from the entire shoot:

Behind the scenes

As has almost become tradition, I placed a camera in several spots during the shoot and edited together a simple behind-the-scenes video:

https://youtu.be/TMOg4oFgcz4