Hudson Valley Photographer { Raquel Big Ol Collaboration Night }
These shots are pretty old too, but I don’t think I ever did a writeup for them. A while back a bunch of us Hudson Valley Photographers got together for a night of drinks, and shooting. Around town, we rarely do stuff like this, but it was great to hang out with a bunch of the other local photogs. We shot at another photographers giant studio space, we had 5-6 models, 5 or so HMUA’s and a group of us photographers. Oh and there was plenty of fireball for the models. I brought some real bourbon though, I can’t stand that fireball stuff.
One of the girls that we invited was Raquel, who at the time had only really done one shoot. Nowadays she’s gone on to shoot with all the top p
hotographers in the area, and put out some really bomber editorial work. At the time though nobody really knew who she was.
Obviously with that many photographers around, we’re all trading models around after they had hair and makeup done. I grabbed raquel for a few quick shots with my ringlight that I had brought with me. I don’t always like ringlight shots, but they have their place, and there was this really cool almost cardboard corrigated wall in the hallway that I wanted to use for a few shots.
Raquel can pretty easily turn on the sexy face, though I didn’t know that before this moment. She got in front of the camera, and instantly I knew she had something special. I really loved her cheekbones in these shots, and I loved her overall energy. She was a pretty goofy, but down to earth kind of girl. She’s actually from Berthoud, so I think this was the point where I started making fun of her from being from such a small town.
Overall this was a super fun night. I wish these types of things happened more often, but sadly there’s a lot of big egos when you get that many photographer together. Everyone wants to show off a bit, and nobody wants to be that photographer who’s just sitting in the corner not shooting. It gets a little bit competitive pretty quickly.
For the first shot, I basically just did basic retouching in Photoshop after a bit of color toning in Lightroom (these were before I started using capture one).
For the bw shot basically the same thing, except in photoshop I added a bit of film dust, and dragged up the red curves layer to add a bit of a pop.
