Thank you for the kind comments, people, it's good to be able to play around with younger (much!) people a little bit, if only because it brings back personal memories of life at that sort of age.
I suppose that it's never easy for a person who's only known one for around an hour to loosen up, especially when that person isn't from the same sort of 'industrial' ethic or background - not that the industry of photography is much of an industry, so to speak, but you probably know what I mean. I think she did rather well considering it's her very first experience, and she's a professional in an entirely different field.
Perhaps I have only once found a girl who was 'right' for me literally from the very first roll of Rolleiflex film shot with her. And thank God for that chance model test session. Truth to tell, it went on to be the making of both of us in our careers, even though hers ended prematurely (from my point of view!) through her marriage and consequent motherhood. And why did it work? If I may refer to Slobodan's thread about child prodigies, elsewhere in LuLa, I put it down to enthusiasm born not of pressure but from desire. She had no financial needs whatsoever; it was the whole thing about fashion and the creativity it can offer people. We did lots of non-payment stuff together on top of the assignments, and that's probably where we taught each other all we ended up using for real. And the wonderful thing you develop with one another is a silent shorthand - intuition, and the joy of not wasting time in blind alleys.
Of course, we were both avid readers of the business literature: Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Nova, and all of those great productions; many greetings didn't reach "Hi!" but were instantly into "did your Vogue arrive yet?". It never happened again for me with anyone else. Looking back at those days, most of the people I respected were the same: Bailey/Shrimpton; Parks/wife/Celia Hammond; John Cowan/Jill Kennington; Terence Donovan/Celia Hammond too, and so on. Why? Rapport. You can't buy it, and hiring it isn't guaranteed either. Those same players could, and often did interchange, but it never meant similar photographs. Thing is, given experienced players, and ones that respect each other, things have a way of working pretty well. I believe that with all my heart and I write as much in my website:
"Most of it was fun, all of it hard work, but I'd happily do it again.
With a proviso: that a new client understands that whilst the abilities of the people on both sides of the camera are crucial, the fact remains that it's the person in front of that machine who ultimately makes or breaks an entire shoot. If you don't see that, and all you really need is a button pusher, you might as well do the job yourself.
Sounds fairly obvious, but you'd be surprised how easily that can be subverted, if you let it.
The right to create the list of models invited to a casting has to be the photographer's.
Clearly, the client is entitled to final choice from that selection of candidates."
No idea how that mantra might fly today, but it was how it generally panned out in my own case. Great times.
Sorry for the diversion, but hey, life's like that!
Rob C
