Today was one of those November days where you look outside and it looks cold but it’s actually a pretty balmy 68 degrees outside, maybe even 70 in direct sunlight. I’m not complaining. Ten years ago there would have already been snow on the ground.

Lily was today’s model. We met randomly on my twenty-fifth birthday party last year somewhere in between shots of Fireball whiskey and beer pong Quidditch. Needless to say, we’re friends now. We’ve been trying to orchestrate a photoshoot for several weeks but, you know, life happens.

It’s hard these days to get out and shoot for fun when you shoot full time for work (not to say that that doesn’t happen simultaneously at times). I love my photo assignments and I love a challenge, but it’s nice to just play sometimes. I feel like working creatives often forget how important it is to create without reason or purpose, to just create for the sake of experimentation. It’s become to easy to get burnt out.

My new goal is to try to do at least one collaboration a month to give myself the space to test out new ideas and to grow as a photographer and to be able to translate that growth into my professional life.

I typically loathe fluorescent lighting. It’s always a soul crushing realization whenever I get to a photo assignment and see it in its nauseating, mocking flickering glory. However, florescent lighting made this shoot pop. It provided a halo of light around Lily so that her features and the textures all stood out in the best way. I’ll probably think differently of fluorescent lighting in terms of photo shoots from now on simply because I figured out how to work it to an advantage.

Along with portraits in a warehouse space, we also took advantage of the wind and sunlight at Druid Hill Park. Every time I go there and I drive past the lake part I think of that cold case of Shirley Parker, that lady that was mysteriously found dead in the TOP of the fountain in the MIDDLE of the lake back in the sixties. No one could figure out how she managed to get up there, much less still be fully clothed, heels and all.  I didn’t even know about that until last year when I did a ride along with a retired BPD officer for a photo assignment. He told me all about it and because of that, Druid Hill Park always creeps me out. I’ll tell whoever will listen that story now just because of how surreal and weird it is.

Anyways, enough about dead ladies in fountains, though I do recommend you reading that linked blog post up there if you have no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve lived in Baltimore for twenty-one out of twenty-six years of my life and it was a new story to me, maybe it’s new to you.

Lily is a model who lives in Baltimore, MD. If you’d like to book a photoshoot with her, please reach out to her here.