ONE MORE DAY, pt. 4

Here’s the link to the images:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C7qMaG04pZemlQgTjUg0fMUUmbfcc4yZ

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ONE MORE DAY

This first part of the Rosamina series gives me an opportunity to talk about how weird my life can be from time to time. Sure, I live in a small, conservative town on the central coast of California. My days are spent being talked down to by people younger than me at a corporate office. I’m the bottom of the barrel here at the office, and since most people are unaware of what I do in my private life, they think I’m some over-weight, middle-aged loser who has never been anywhere or down anything with my life. And for the most part, I’m fine with letting them believe that, because sometimes I feel the exact same way about myself.

So a few weeks ago I received a message from Rosamina, a beautiful model who said she was traveling to LA and would like to meet with me. I knew nothing about her apart from her images on Instagram, but frankly I was still tackling my huge backlog of photos and had no interest in driving to LA just to add to the backlog. I was just busy and in a negative mood and wasn’t interested in making an effort for anything that wasn’t going to help me feel better. I politely wished her well but said I would be too busy to make it to LA for the week she’d be visiting, and she counteroffered me by saying she and her boyfriend would be more than willing to drive the three hours up the coast just to shoot with me. Sure, I’m a jerk, but I also know that when someone is that interested in working with you, you need to say “thank you” and make time for them. So I did.

Last Saturday was the day, and they left the LA area at 6am in order to make it up here by 9, with her exhausted half Japanese, half Australian boyfriend sleeping in the car while she came back to my small granny-unit apartment behind my friend’s home where I’ve lived for the last few years.

Rosamina is tiny, barely 5’2”, and of course, I asked her for her life story, which I learned was incredibly fascinating. While she stripped and applied make-up, we shared stories. She was born in Mongolia the year after the revolution to overthrow communism. Her parents are both highly educated, with her mom becoming a very famous author in the country, while her dad became the spokesman for the president of Mongolia. “I grew up in the elite class,” she said, matter-of-factly, which spoke volumes in and of itself.

She went to good schools, was given a fine education, graduated early at 16 because even by that point she was rebellious and eager to go explore the world. She had traveled and was naturally curious, and sadly had never really been shown love by her parents, who had divorced and gotten back together while also focusing heavily on their intense careers. So she moved several times in those teenage years, finally settling in Australia after attending university in a few countries. This is where she met her boyfriend, began modeling, and truly began to discover herself. She was artsy, clearly cool and hip, fun, easy to smile, open with her body, smart and challenging, and surprisingly sexy (I’ve never been personally drawn to Asian women, but she had a power that was almost irresistible). I was impressed with her rather quickly. Most importantly for my ego, she was coming to the United States for a full, two month photo excursion, with only a week in Los Angeles, and she was still willing to waste a full day driving up just to work with me. I was incredibly honored.

I was still somewhat creatively dry, so I’m embarrassed that I just shot her on my fold out sofa bed, as I have too many others lately. But thankfully she is a great model and made the work light and easy. Even though I thought the set-up boring, she has a different and dynamic look that made the experience seem somewhat new and fresh to me a bit. From there, we headed to the dunes, but that’s a series for another day.

We took several different sets of photos in just those two locations, and if you like these, I’ll post more. Let me know what you think!

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 What do you think of Rosamina? Want to see more? Please let me know! You can always send me your feedback, positive or negative, and feel free to leave comments in the box below or in my DMs! And thank you as always for your continued support, it means the world to me!

Here’s that link again:

 https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C7qMaG04pZemlQgTjUg0fMUUmbfcc4yZ