The sounds of LanaDel Ray’s Blue Jeans & Metronomy’s The Bay start rhythmically turning & bouncing in my mind when I remember my late August trip to Berlin in 2012….
Living in Bavaria at the time, I would visit Berlin a few times a year & this was to be my “summer big city fix.” I had just set up my business a year prior & had only recently started cutting my teeth on test & portfolio shoots.
I love to shoot when I travel & figured that these late summer days would be a good time for photoshooting with local models in Berlin for the first time. After sending an inquiry & making collaborative contact with Berlin based agency Modelfabrik, my “vacation” days were quickly filling up with back to back portfolio shoots.
And I loved it!!
Those sexy & sassy songs were the soundtrack in my mind as their videos looped on the Fashion TV channel that I had playing whenever I was in my room at the Pestana Berlin Tiergarten. I had stayed at this lovely hotel in the leafy & quite Embassy district earlier that year with my husband & we deemed it a favorite. I loved having a comfortable & quiet retreat to recharge in as basically all of my moments in the city were spent at or en route to a shoot.
Through Modelfabrik I had 6 portfolio shoots with male models that week, all of them professional, relaxed & kind. Through another agency I had an additional 3 shoots, all female.
The combined effect was an extremely dynamic “photoshoot journey” in which I experimented with different locations & atmospheres but also (perhaps even more importantly) got a feel for communication & connection on shoot with models. I had a good sense already of my inherent, yet developing style, but this trip really laid out for me that what suited me best for fashion & style shooting is a peripatetic, fluid & rather candid type of flow.
The photos provided me with a lot to work with – I was at the very inception phase of my portfolio building – and the experiences also provided me with valuable feedback from the models themselves.
And overall, while I have had many great & interesting trips, this one remains so special in my mind as a memory of something completely new, so exciting & something I plan to repeat many times over. I love to “work” when I travel, because meeting cities new & old means opportunity to me- for creation, for engagement & for new works.
