Behind the Scenes

Enlightened Collection – The Story

Part 1

The Story behind the scenes of the Enlightened Collection

We shot these in November, and for those of you that aren’t familiar with the Salt Lake City area in November I’ll spell it out for you, it’s not warm.  Which meant we needed a heated pool or a plane ride out of Utah. The heated pool sounded cheaper.

We planned to travel south to St. George, Utah; an hour-and-a-half north of Vegas, which is close enough to taste yet far enough that you don’t get that Vegas after-taste, in other words a perfect place for this photoshoot.

Coordinating the nearly dozen people required for a shoot like this is hard enough, now try coordinating a 400 mile road trip on top of that.  Yikes!  So some of the details got put off to the last minute, one of those was the state of the pool’s heater, which we found out was broken about 24-hours before travel time.  After finding out that a timely repair wasn’t possible we immediately decided that a high of 54 degrees Fahrenheit in St. George’s November was not nearly warm enough for any kind of un-heated pool activities.  St. George’s November?  Sounds like a Guns N’ Roses song. Hey GnR – loved you in the nineties by the way!

So there we were, no pool and lots of people scheduled for a pretty major project that required a pool (no, you cannot fake water in photoshop realistically – in case you were wondering).  After about an hour of panicked phone calls to everyone that was important to the shoot I realized something… hotels have heated pools and we have lots of hotels in my hometown. So I called the manager of the Layton Comfort Inn to ask him some questions about their indoor pool.  The main question being, “Hey, after you close your pool tonight can I bring a model in there and do a test shoot?”

“Yes,” was his response.  Matt, the manager, and I go way back by the way.

Now I just had to find a model that was available with nearly zero notice at 8:30PM on a Thursday night, a Thursday night dominated by a cold November Rain no less.

If you are not familiar with the process of finding a last minute model let me tell you how it works.  You get your iPhone (which is the most amazing device ever invented, and if you disagree then you probably don’t have one) and start a new text message, then you add between 3 and 7 girls to send the message to.

“Why not text just one girl and wait for her to respond?” you ask?

I’ve become an expert in girl behavior and here is how it works, if a girl is busy they don’t generally actually say so, they just read the text message and keep doing whatever it is they were doing when they got the message – thinking in their brain that they’ll respond later.  Later usually means, “Hey, sorry I missed your text yesterday, what’s up?”

So I text multiple girls and if multiple girls say yes all but one of them is encouraged to “Answer quicker next time!”

Here’s a quirky little secret though, since there is a limit to how many girls I text I usually don’t go too far into my contact list before stopping… if you are smart then you may have noticed where this is going – girls with a first name that starts with a letter that is early in the alphabet tend to get more text messages about last minute shoots.  So, if you are Zooey Deschanel and you’re wondering why I haven’t called lately now you know. Hey Zooey – loved you in Almost Famous by the way!

Christie Iba

Christie is not only absolutely stunning but she is also blessed with a name that starts with C and a text-response rate of less than 2 minutes, which is solidly above average!  Christie had a problem though, “Can I call in you like 5 minutes?” she queried.

Fast forward five minutes. “Ok, I can come, where do you want me to meet?  What should I bring?”

“My house, swimming suit.”

“A swimming suit?”

“Oh ya, we’re going to be shooting in a pool.”  –Editorial note, I don’t like writing long text messages… so generally girls may not know exactlywhat they’ve agreed to!

I pack up my gear just as she arrives and we head over to the hotel, as we pull up to the brightly lit entry way I suddenly hope that none my neighbors drive by and see me pulling up to a hotel at 10PM with a beautiful girl that is not my wife… which leads me to a very funny story about my neighbors…

Unrelated Story about Jake Garn’s Retired Neighbors

Across the street from me is the nicest couple in the history of mankind, they are so nice that if I forget to take my garbage can to the curb on garbage day they actually do it for me.  Seriously nice.

One day, about a year before my wife and I got married my neighbor stopped me at the mailbox and she asked me, “So, I see a lot of cars over here with lots of pretty girls and we were wondering, is the girl with the red car your main girlfriend?”  So I had to explain that Jenny (my now wife) was my only girlfriend, all the other girls are models that I photograph.”

“Ooooohhhh, I see,” she said, “Well my husband is going to be sorry to hear that, he was pretty impressed with you.”

100% true.

Back to Christie Iba

I unload my Elinchrom 600RX Monolight with a Large Photoflex Softbox and put it right to the edge of the pool, as Chrsitie jumped in and got her hair wet… the pool was perfectly warm, the room looked great and this looked like it could work!  The shot?  Well it looked fabulous with the flash falling off perfectly across the water obscuring the other side of the pool into darkness.

I started calling everyone to let them know that our carefully planned road-trip was now a half-hazardly planned all-nighter.  An epic all-nighter.

Stay Tuned for Part II of the story, where we actually shoot!