CTO or No CTO

CTO or no CTO? That was the question! The shoots for this project are not that easy for me. I am not an experienced portrait photographer or particularly communicative. Yet I give myself just two hours to meet someone I have never met, deal with a place I may barely know, come up with an idea on my feet, and execute it amid all unpredictable parameters.
Each model can also change the creative process. Some arrive with their own ideas. Others leave the creative direction entirely to me, which may at first feel like more pressure and less of a collaboration, but I have gradually realised that it can be liberating. I must trust myself, accept that some ideas won’t work, and keep trying until something does.
That said, I like to let the model into my process too. Talking through what I am thinking or doing keeps the exchange going and gives the model a chance to bring their creative judgement into the shoot, which is often much sharper than mine.
With Odile, for the first few minutes I genuinely had no idea where to begin. London Fields looked completely different from what I had imagined, and we were about to leave the park when we saw this rather ordinary tree hit by the setting sun and decided to follow the hunch.
A few frames later, the golden light made me think of a CTO (i.e. orange) gel, which I had hardly ever used. I put one on the flash, and suddenly the flash and setting sun belonged to the same world and Odile’s skin took on this beautiful warmth. I showed her the pictures. She liked the CTO much more. And that was that—we were off to a fantastic shoot!
By the end of these shoots, with the sun long set and the last photographs taken, I tend to let the model go straight away. Their time is theirs, and packing my equipment afterwards is my responsibility. I also need some time to come down from the physical and emotional intensity. So I sit on my own for a while, savour the feeling of having spent those hours making something, and hope that the person who shared that time with me enjoyed the experience too.
And if I have been lucky, and at my best, I may have caught something of the texture of those passing hours on my image sensor.

With Odile in London Fields.
From the series Here We Are.