A recent photo shoot - Maenad from Model Mayhem

I met Maenad (Mae, for short) through the online modeling community ModelMayhem a little over a month ago. I wrote to her and described the photo project that I was working on; "Cemetery Girls" and she responded saying that she was interested. We communicated for several weeks, getting to know each other. Basically, I wanted to explain to her what the concept of my project was, that it was tied to the literary project that I was working on and that the girls I was photographing were attempts at helping me better find my novel's character.

Mae is a student of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, but as we wrote more to each other I found out that she is many more things than just a psych student. My point in telling you these details is to be able to describe what my experience of working with her was like. I drove form San Ramon to Santa Cruz to pick her up on campus after her last class of the day, which was around 3pm on a Friday. We then drove to her home so that she could change clothes for our shoot. She invited me inside to help choose what she would wear.

Then we drove across town to Evergreen Cemetery and got right to work. Mae has to be the easiest person I have ever worked with as a model. For one thing her natural beauty is so overwhelming I almost found it impossible to take a bad photograph of her. Her ease of movement and light spirit made it simple to give her directions, which she could follow almost exactly to a tee.

I felt no nervousness with her at all, unlike how I do sometimes the first 10-20 minutes on a shoot with a new model. I think a lot of that comfort level came from how we laid a groundwork in getting to know each other before hand.

So I want to score Maenad 9 out of 10 stars for how well our shoot went. The only thing that would have made me happier was to have gotten more photographs of her.