A couple of years ago, I saw this one-piece outfit online somewhere, and my imagination took off! I knew there was a fantastic shoot with this costume in my future. I had a particular type of model in mind. At the time, I didn’t know who, but I knew it would come to me one day. That day, I met Elena at her personal pole studio to try out some 360 videos of her doing pole; she is a world-class pole dancer/artist. After we captured the footage, we shot some stills in her studio. While I was still photographing her, I remembered this outfit and that Elena was who I was looking for!

 

I went home and looked up a link for the outfit, and called her to tell her my idea. She looked up the costume and got back to me saying that she had purchased it! Perfect! Now, the location.

 

On Instagram, I had seen some very cool subway station photos of a dancer and was inspired. I decided to dedicate a day to exploring the subways of Los Angeles. The station most convenient to me was the Hollywood and Highland station in Hollywood. It was terrific; I thought it was perfect. But being a bit of a perfectionist, I wanted to ride the train and see if there was anything else that might be better. Plus, the train ended across the street from Philippes French Dip restaurant, the perfect excuse to have a sandwich! There wasn’t any other location that came close to the Hollywood and Highland station, but I did get my sandwich.

 

When I got home, I called Elena to let her know I had found the location I was looking for. We set a 3 pm date at the subway station below the Kodak Center Theatre.

 

My concern was that the station would be busy, and I would have to edit many people out of the photos, but we were lucky! There was hardly anyone there! In fact, just enough people to capture a couple of interesting images with an observer present. I will post one another time.

 

As you can see in the photographs, the location is perfect for Elena’s Android-like suit. Very futuristic, and the colors are just right. Elena went into character and took fantastic direction! She is a pleasure to photograph and made me look good.

 

As there was no daylight available, I had to use on-camera flash. The secret sauce is using the cement ceiling as a bounce to make the flash more attractive and less noticeable. This also allowed me to have the available lights in the photo go much warmer as the flash is very blue. Warming up the blue light makes the ambient light even warmer. Perfect! All of the images were captured handheld.

 

I will be sharing more photos from this shoot in the near future.

 

Here are the settings for the images below:

 

1st photo Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L series lens shot at 35mm at f/2.8, shutter speed 1/50th of a second, ISO-1250, with flash set to ETTL

2nd photo Canon 135mm f/2.0 L series lens shot at f/2.0, shutter speed 1/60 of a second, ISO-1250 with NO Flash just available light. As I was standing too far away to bounce the flash.