The assignment here was to make two photo's of a small and personal shop: a photo of the front, and a portrait of the owner.
For once deciding on what to shoot was extremely simple, as I frequent a small shop in Eindhoven for exactly the same criteria as the assignment: a small personal shop, not yet part of a chain, probably mainly because it's just catering to a niche.
The Switch. A small, cramped shop, in my mind always a bit like a treasure trove in its mystery and content. The owner, however, presented a minor problem.
She was perfectly ok with me making photo's of the store, but a bit less enthousiastic about appearing herself in one of the photo's. Reason being bad experiences with what photo's are later used for, and a general dislike of being on the wrong end of a camera.
After a bit of asking nicely she did come up with a solution: a friend of hers occasionally minded the shop for her, and he already had posed as model more often. We make an appointment.
About two weeks later I come back for the shoot, and meet said friend. A middle-aged man with shoulderlong black hair, and an air both slightly pompous and rather carefree. Charming.
One thing was clear almost straight away: he liked the sense of attention that modelling brings. It was almost like he was dating my camera.
The shoot itself was not very pre-planned, and mostly involved me trying to get my lighting right with a brand-new flash.
One important lesson remained from this: watch out with dark backgrounds and models wearing dark clothing. My main issue was that his black vest was blending into the background, making everything even darker.
I went back later, and together we picked out a white shirt from the shop for the shoot.
The white helped even more than I anticipated in having him catch the attention in the extremely crowded shop. I left the surroundings rather dark to truthfully represent the store, but next time I'll have to do that a bit more deliberate, as it was commented on at the assessment as being a possible drawback.
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