con·fi·dence
con·fi·dence (ˈkänfədəns) n. 1. a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities. “she’s brimming with confidence”
This word perfectly describes Noelle; and our subsequent shoot. She carries herself in such a manner that you can’t help but notice the air of confidence she exudes. It isn’t cockiness or arrogance; instead it is this unpretentious feeling of modesty. And it is really contagious when you are in the same room with her.
We went back and forth for about a week going over a growing mood board of images we were both contributing to before we had even set a date to shoot. We did a meet and greet last Thursday and both adamantly decided we should shoot ASAP; which ended up happening this past Sunday. Over the course of those three hours on Sunday, we talked about life and shared stories; laughing our asses off at times. We rearranged the room we were shooting in two, if not three different times. I also sang along to Taylor Swift; quite poorly. I clicked away as we were talking without ever having to actually direct the shoot or help pose Noelle (it helps that these types of shoots don’t really require much in the line of posing and a testament to how comfortable Noelle was). The entire shoot and the select images to follow flowed like a comfortable, real and intimate conversation.
My use of the word intimate as an adjective follows with these definitions: 1. characterized by or involving warm friendship or a personally close or familiar association or feeling and (of an association, knowledge, understanding, etc.) arising from close personal connection or familiar experience. I know, I have probably been beating a dead horse with describing how I want my shoots to feel like a comfortable conversation with an old friend. But have yet to find a better way to try to describe the look and feel to people.
There are so many amazing images from this shoot and Sunday afternoon creating with Noelle that it was really hard to narrow them down and not just share all of the “edits” (I put edits in quotation marks since outside of tonal and color corrections, these images are pretty much as shot). And rest assured, we are already talking and planning on a couple more projects in the near future.
Also, can we please talk about how amazing tan lines are?
