"My eyes! ...they've booby-trapped their sun!"

SO! I had one hell of a three-day-weekend. I spent much of it sleep-deprived, I worked my butt off, but I had some fun in there, too.

I've been freelancing on a print design/layout project since before the holidays, so I've been blowing most of my spare minutes on that since last Wednesday or Thursday. I put the final nail in it this morning, though, and sent out the invoice, so yay money. It didn't stretch my design skills, so much, but the client is thrilled with it, and they said it looked awesome when they test printed one of the prior drafts. So, yeah, it could certainly have gone worse!

Anyhoo, the shoot I had planned for Saturday was actually pretty fun: I'd met the girl before at one of the runway shows I shot, and she was a tall, plus-ish girl with a great hourglass shape. I did some very on-the-fly set design based on the clothes she brought, and she did her own makeup and hair, but I'm pretty darned happy with the results, so far. I have more shots that I want to edit, but here are the first few:

( Saturday Pho-tos (+4) )

After the shoot, I got lost, thanks to a botched address cut-and-paste into Google maps, but I eventually made it to sarapada's birthday party. Among other things, there was Guitar Hero III, a light-up t-shirt, stories from high school, Super Monkey Ball, girly-smelling scented things, and a somewhat anti-climactic "man-off." Yes, good times, indeed.

Sunday, I managed to squeeze in some yoga and some photo processing in the morning, before doing a portrait session with a high school senior. I was pretty exhausted by that point, and the black backdrop decided to fall off the stand into a heap as I was changing it, but I pulled through and had a nice time working with the girl. She wasn't one of those super-awkward, camera-shy kids, so I played around with posing her a little, and it actually worked pretty well.

One of the other people who responded to my, "hey, let's do a random shoot!" posting for Saturday was a signed model, and I heard a whisper of opportunity in the wind on that one, because OMGWTFAGENCYAAAAGH. So, even though I hadn't intended to, I set up a shoot time for Monday with her, as well. I did have one cool concept in mind that I'd been sitting on for a while, but we had zero plan beyond that, so I was feeling some pressure to have my act together, since she's a Real Model Who Gets Paid To Model. XD

We pulled together a couple other outfits based on the clothes she brought, Ben was there this time to tweak the lighting, at those moments when my tired-and-stressed brain checked out, and I think we got some awesome shots that'll be great for our portfolio, if not for hers! I'm hoping that this sort of thing will help get our foot in the door with some local agencies, because fashion concepts are pretty fun to plan out, and diversifying our income further would be Teh Win. :D

Oh yeah, and we'll be working with at least one, probably two more agency girls in the near future, too, and a few other very skilled models who, by all rights, *should* be signed. Yay!

And, no, I'm not done with the shots from Monday yet, so... maybe tomorrow. :)