There are people that I feel I haven’t shot with enough. I’ve shot with Mariam a bunch of times and she is still one of those people I feel I haven’t shot with enough. Having a day job sucks because it makes it hard to schedule shoot sometimes. But, you know, bills and stuff; so a day job is also pretty nice. Anyway, Mariam is such a nice, warm, kind person, with an amazing sense of style. So when we are able to squeeze in a shoot, especially when the weather is nice, it’s always a plus.
The Location
Alta Plaza Park, San Francisco, by the Jackson and Pierce intersection. And random people’s homes on the 3500 block of Jackson Street.
The Model
The lovely, Mariam, who was one of my favorite IG names: https://www.instagram.com/closetvice/
The Shoot
We had been going back and forth on scheduling a shoot and things finally worked out. We didn’t have a location and time until last minute. I knew I wanted more of a clean location and Pacific Heights definitely fits the bill. Mariam typically has more streamlined, clean looks, and I tend to go a similar route with locations when we shoot.
It was a really sunny day and we were shooting mid-day. Because we are going more for a natural look, we began by shooting in the shade. The opposite side of the street was sunny and some of that light reflected to the shady side, so it’s like having a big light illuminating things. Mariam pulls out these really cool poses, so we knocked out the first look pretty quickly. We were going to shoot in the Alta Plaza Park but I needed to grab more lights for that and I wasn’t sure that I would even like how that would look for this shoot, so we ended up leaving to another location.
For the second location, I was planning on shooting by a tiny park entrance on the edge of Presidio Park, but I didn’t like how the light looked so we ended up going block over to Jackson Street.
Back on Jackson street, we started out with a polka dress and transitioned into a leopard print dress. For the polka dot dress, we stuck more with neutrals and some greens. For the Leopard dress, we stuck more with earthy tones. I typically like contrast, but because there wasn’t enough contrast with the backgrounds, I felt like color cohesion was more important and I leaned into that. The background choices were intentionally matchy. I think the Leopard dress over the grey would have been busy, although the polka dot dress over the brick would have popped. We were under some time constraints and didn’t have time to go somewhere else, but I was happy with the choices so there wasn’t a need for it anyway.
Behind the Scenes
The Shots
