Assistant or not assistant

On my latest shoot I wanted to play with fabrics again. They do those nice flowy things, wrinkles, textures.. In other words - they look awesome.

So, find a model, find a piece of fabric, and go go go!

Ha, not so fast. Either my fabrics are comparably heavy, or my wind blower is not powerful enough. But we had a problem to make the fabric piece to flow nicely. Took us more than an hour of trying in vain to get the fabric behave in a way I wanted with no satisfactory results. Clops or additional string did not help.

So my model graciously suggested to invite his spouse for help.

While waiting, we did try to make another image with the same fabric, but requiring no assistance. Here it is:

So, the assistant did a great job. In 10 minutes we were finished. Yey!

Here is the image that has the best combination of good face expression, and nice fabric behind.

Looks simple. However it took me about 30 min to style the hair, and about 2 hours in total of good and bad tries. And another 60 min in Lightroom and photoshop trying to find the best images, and editing all those stray hairs out.

It was wonderful to have some assistance in this simple portrait shoot. Unfortunately in many of my nude shoots, an assistant is out of question. :(