I met Candice as I was walking out of my neighborhood grocery store. She’s astonishingly beautiful which caught my eye right away. She was canvassing for signatures for a local political cause and asked if I would be willing to sign the petition. I said I would be willing to give her my signature if she let me take her photo.
A short back story of Candice. She immigrated with her family a few years ago with her family from the Ivory Coast to the States.
Technical asides: I’ve taken to always having my camera with me when I go to this particular place as the veranda out front is almost ideal lighting during most times of the day. My goal would be to position the subject so that the background would be the length of the veranda as it would provide interesting leading lines, but at this time it was later in the day and there just wasn’t enough light for what I wanted directly under the veranda. So I had Candice step out from under it and used a bricked pillar as a background.
Candice happened to have a clipboard with white paper in it. I asked her to hold it up and angle it just right to throw a little extra light onto her face. It worked out well.
She is naturally photogenic so she didn’t need much direction from me. The first couple of shots she looked directly at the camera and gave me a big smile. I then asked her if she could slightly turn her head to one side and cut her eyes to me and “burn right through the lens with her eyes.”
Excellent. I then asked her to do me a favor. As if reading my mind she said, “You want me to not smile, right?”
Exactly.
In total, I shot six photos; all of them quite nice, but this one, the very last one, was my favorite.
The total time from when I first saw her to when I shook her hand and thanked her was about 4 or 5 minutes.