Womanwise 12
16/11/09 22:12 Filed in: Technique
Destra Garcia was, apparently, worried.
You might understand how this would seem strange to me. This is a woman who has braved the most wanton spaces of the Carnival season, triumphing in what was, until recently, very much a man’s world, doing so in the most saucily female way possible.
With all the physical changes the soca singer’s body was going through in this full phase of her pregnancy, she’d made it clear that she had big concerns about how the photos would turn out.
This was a situation that called for some craft, some technique and a lot of tact and reassurance.
With no location that seemed right for the shoot, I decided to invite Destra to the studio where I could exercise the most control over the final image. I really prefer to do images for this series on location, but you have to use the right tools for the job at hand.
Destra was, of course, different. Her baby bump had become a baby sphere, and her face was radiant with the changes her body was going through.
Her first outfit wasn’t what I had in mind at all. A tight fitting, leopard spotted number, it was the soca star on the town, proud of her altered physique. We did the photos in alignment with her intent, something spirited, saucy but still vaguely maternal.
My tacit endorsement of that shoot won me some slack for the photo I really wanted, a photo that cast her in a new light, adapting to a new phase of her career and her life.
I really wanted to lay Destra out on a table and shoot across the length of her body, elongating her neck and bodyline but that didn’t seem possible given the way she was struggling with her new body.
Instead, I asked her to sit on the floor on a cushion, climbed a ladder and shot at a sharp angle down on the singer. Destra absolutely hated the maternity dress she was wearing, but I though it was delightfully uncharacteristic, a uniform of change. I shot wide open with a 100mm macro lens to render Destra below the neck to a soft impressionistic blur.
Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery
You might understand how this would seem strange to me. This is a woman who has braved the most wanton spaces of the Carnival season, triumphing in what was, until recently, very much a man’s world, doing so in the most saucily female way possible.
With all the physical changes the soca singer’s body was going through in this full phase of her pregnancy, she’d made it clear that she had big concerns about how the photos would turn out.
This was a situation that called for some craft, some technique and a lot of tact and reassurance.
Destra was, of course, different. Her baby bump had become a baby sphere, and her face was radiant with the changes her body was going through.
Her first outfit wasn’t what I had in mind at all. A tight fitting, leopard spotted number, it was the soca star on the town, proud of her altered physique. We did the photos in alignment with her intent, something spirited, saucy but still vaguely maternal.
My tacit endorsement of that shoot won me some slack for the photo I really wanted, a photo that cast her in a new light, adapting to a new phase of her career and her life.
Instead, I asked her to sit on the floor on a cushion, climbed a ladder and shot at a sharp angle down on the singer. Destra absolutely hated the maternity dress she was wearing, but I though it was delightfully uncharacteristic, a uniform of change. I shot wide open with a 100mm macro lens to render Destra below the neck to a soft impressionistic blur.
Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery
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