I first met Chiara at a rhythmic gymnastics workshop which was organized by a local gym school, where she was attending as a technical coordinator. As a rhythmic gymnast Chiara won many competitions at an international level and she even won a silver medal at the XXXII World Championship in Kiev with her team, thus she knows a lot about this sport. During the ritual photo shooting at the workshop, it was immediately clear that Chiara is a perfect model: she has an athletic body, she is very empathic and she seems extremely at ease in front of a camera.
That casual meeting led to the idea of a more structured photographic project: as a location, we chose the beach in Ostia at late afternoon. We chose to shoot in one of the days when she was supposed to be in Rome, since she lives in a different town. We also agreed about other important details such as makeup, hair, different types of dress and poses.
Two weeks after that meeting we finally gave life to our common project! From a technical point of view, I have never had doubts about how to shoot: since the beginning I knew I would use a telephoto lens and an off-camera flash with a softbox, to get full control of colors and light.
Chiara came together with a dear friend of her (named Chiara as well), whose support was critical. In fact, not only she gave good suggestions during the shooting and she helped us keeping and informal and relaxed environment, she also proved showed excellent skills as a lighting assistant!
As soon as Chiara put the first dress on we immediately started shooting, this not only allowed us to adjust lighting and poses quite quickly, but it also helped us relaxing and create the right mood since the beginning.
Chiara behaved as a real athlete since the first shots, she carefully followed my directives and she approached every shot with a sense of discipline that is typical of those who practiced sports at a high level. At the end of each session, we controlled the results together in order to ensure that the poses were spotless and the photos were technically correct. In case of any imperfection, a session would be repeated in order to get the desired results. Despite this, Chiara was always relaxed and at easy in every photo, even during the most demanding poses.
After the first half an hour light started to change quickly, and after a quick change of dress we were ready to go through the most interesting part of the shooting, the one with the sunset and its rich and full colors! Apart from the strong wind, the weather conditions were ideal, with scattered clouds that were enhancing the warm colors of the sun.
We tried to make the most of the perfect lighting conditions and we also shot some photos to our “assistant” Chiara, who not only gave us great support during the shooting, but she proved to be an excellent model as well!
We managed to shoot during the last minutes of the sunset in order to get even richer and saturated colors, but after a few last shots it was soon the time to put the equipment back in the bag and go back home, with the great curiosity of seeing the final results on my monitor. In a 1-hour shooting we managed to get several nice photos using different lighting conditions. Our expectations were fully met!
