Today I bring you the lovely Alex with her enchanting eyes. I met Alex when she was bar tending back at the now defunct Miami Prime. I ran into her at her new job at the Bru’s Room, which just opened another spot down the street from me. We talked for a bit and I showed her the photo shoot I did with Lorell which got her interest in having me shoot her.
After talking ideas etc. we decided we would do the shoot in Ft.Lauderdale. I’ve been going on interviews there so I’ve been scouting out locations on my way to and from etc. As in most of my shoots, Vince, aka the Stone Groove, accompanied me to help out with the lighting etc. We got there a bit before Alex did so I did one final walk through of all the shots and locations I had in mind. I literally had like a block and a half of locations I was going to work with which was great because Alex could change clothes at her car without lugging her bag all over etc.
Our first location was the New River Inn. The New River Inn is used for receptions and things of that nature. They had some rocking chairs out front and I thought that would be a good place for us to start. There was a wedding reception being set up so we had to use the side of the New River Inn for our shots. Midway through shooting here I wasn’t really feeling the shots etc. It had nothing to do with Alex but with more of the cramped quarters where parts of windows and pillars were in the shot and when I zoomed in I was cutting off limbs etc. So I just cut our losses and moved on to the next location.
We went to Las Olas Riverfront next. Talk about a decaying place. This place use to be the hot spot in downtown Ft.Lauderdale and now it’s just empty businesses etc. We started out shooting on the stairs on the first level and then moved up to the second level. Up on the second level we found this huge outdoor bar which was surrounded by caution tape so we pretended the caution tape did not exist and I shot Alex up on the bar. We shot on the second level for a bit and it was great because no one was there. I won’t lie I was waiting for the rats and roaches to start crawling out of the wood work but I didn’t want to scare Alex that much. I’m sure the highlight of shooting up there was me trying to show Alex some sexy pose I had in mind for her but I’m sure I really made it look worse than it was. And there is a reason why I don’t model.
After we left that part of Riverfront we moved over into the street for some shots. I like danger I think because I was in the middle of the street with her and traffic was all around us. Once I began shooting traffic wasn’t an issue. People literally stopped to watch us shoot. It got to a point where Alex was directing traffic and people were breaking their necks trying to see what was going on. I was just happy none of us got hit.
After our daredevil stunt I pondered how could I top that. Well, I figure we’ll shoot on the train tracks adjacent to the Riverfront location. The train tracks had this walkway which bridged Riverfront with some bars on the other side. I was hesitant on shooting Alex on the tracks because I had just shot Lorell on train tracks earlier this month and I’m not keen on reproducing the same shots over and over. I like to try different things. Either way we shot there and we had our own audience as the people passing by would stop and say hello or ask what we were doing.
For our final location we headed across the street to the top of this parking garage which had a nice view of the downtown buildings. I was scouted this out earlier and I wasn’t keen on it but when we got there the sun was starting to set which made it that much more desirable to shoot. The other idea I had was to shoot inside the elevator that had these reflective walls. So we kept going between floors 2-7 so we could have the elevator to ourselves to shoot. I had to lay on the ground to grab some shots and lord know what homeless person did to tarnish those floors but I made the sacrifice for the shot. Afterwards we grabbed some tacos and Coronas to end the day.
