I always try to take a week off work if I can around my birthday and as it happened, that’s the week that fell when I had my first shoot with Jaime. That wasn’t the only shoot planned for that week however.
Dea Dicapria and I had stayed loosely in contact since our shoot in January and it just so happened her next trip to London would be during the week I had off. I absolutely jumped at the opportunity and booked myself in with her as soon as I could. As far as I was concerned we had some unfinished business and I was keen to shoot her in some decent weather! There’s not many models I’ll travel so far for – but Dea is definitely one of them.
Not knowing London brilliantly, my plan was to shoot around Chinatown which at least was somewhere I’d walked around once before. Arriving around an hour before we were due to meet I figured I had plenty of time to scout the area out and work out some potential shots. Now of course, things never go to plan! Dea was held up and told me she’d be a little late! So, with still plenty of time to spare I walked over to Soho to find a (reasonably priced) Thai restaurant and had myself some Pad Thai.
After finishing my meal I once again headed out to meet Dea … and disaster! She was still delayed! Not knowing what else to do, I sat myself down on the pavement and people watched for an hour or so!
Eventually Dea made it and although it might have been easy to become annoyed, one smile from her and it was all OK. Although we were down to only around an hour of shooting time, I knew that would be more than enough to get some good images with a model of her ability.
Luckily, I’d used my time earlier to pick the locations which meant we could whizz through them just before it got dark. We started in Chinatown, then crossed Shaftesbury Avenue into Soho. My most amusing moment was when Dea and I went into a massage parlour to ask if we could use a room for her to change outfits in … they refused … heaven knows what they thought was going on!
And so here are the images from my second shoot with Dea. And I’m pretty happy with them. She’s one hell of a model and I really hope we can arrange shoot number three when she eventually returns to the UK!
