I met Mariam on Instagram in late 2015 had a conversation with her and we ended up being friends. The friendship developed through snapchat. I like following the models I intend to want to work with on snapchat so as to know what type of personality they have. This helps me because I will know what to expect on the shoot. Yes, you could call it some kind of audition. By then I was in Arusha working for School of Jude a charity organization. So, we planned to do the shoot when I am Dar es Salaam. We rescheduled a couple times but ended doing it on 10th January, 2017.

I wanted a casual simple black and white look. Also I was thinking backlight and white colors. So, I used the white silk like material that I use a lot for my backlight work and white bedcover that the model brought since I didn’t have any. The white silk material like I bought it for $1 per meter and its 2 x 1 meter.

This was the first time I met Mariam in person. But we were very comfortable with one another since we already established some sort of friendship through communicating on snapchat. Let me take you to how the shoot went down.

Setting

I put the white bed cover on the bed obviously and I used the simple silk like cloth as a shoot through for the backlight. I put the white silk cloth as a curtain using pegs on the window and set one flash on a light stand with a wireless trigger outside the window so as to shoot through the white silk cloth. The flash was set 1 feet away from the window. I pushed the bed closer to the window where the white silk material was positioned. I also had a second flash on a light stand with a wireless trigger pointing up the ceiling. The ceiling was white so I used it as a modifier to bounce light back to the model on the bed. Also since the bed had white bedcover it also acted as a reflector The outside flash shooting through the white silk material was set to 1/4 power and the flash inside the room was set 1/16 power. However, I was occasionally changing the power of the flash that was inside.

Shooting

We started with a gown. So I had to do some elegant simple poses. Also, I had a minor challenge of space, I was working with was a small window where the white silk material was and I had to frame my subject within that small window size. That meant I had to shoot the whole session in mostly portrait orientation. Then we had a boyfriend jeans look, which was my fav one. I still had to stick to shooting in portrait orientation mode.

**Camera: Nikon D7200 Arperture. f/5 Shutter: 1/200 sec ISO: 200Focal Length: 40mm**

“use what you have. do what you can”

— Arthur Ashe