We did my hand shots a couple weeks before school got out, at Essex Studios in Clifton. Essex is an old button factory-turned "artist group" warehouse. It is divided into 15 x 15 rooms with cement floors, separated by cement-brick walls that don't quite reach the ceiling. Its age is evident; a tangle of pipes overwhelm the ceiling and it has ghetto elementary school windows, the kind that open outward and bring back memories of staring out into the Reading Garden, woefully neglecting your cursive. An overgrown stretch of pavement in the back of the building serves as its parking lot, and what look like giant set pieces from cirque du soleil lean creepily against the chipped brick. A set of sketchy, rickety wooden stairs leads to an out of place, passkey-protected door.
Inside, the halls are spotted with abstract art and rusty sculptures, but no people. It is eerily quiet, and a rusted farm scale and ancient Cincinnati Ballet posters decorate the women's (soapless) bathroom.
Sharon's studio is new, or at least new to her. When we went there it was empty except for a stool, some light reflector boards, and a roll of gray background paper. I put the clothes I had brought on the dusty floor and we got started.
First, Sharon had me do a natural, just-hands shot. I clasped my hands together like a lotion commercial, and held them away from me so only they were visible, and moved them a fraction of an inch every time we took a shot. The first thing I found out about hand modeling is that once your hands look good, it is ridiculously easy. Unlike regular modeling, you can look at your hands and see immediately whether the picture will look good or not. Ultimately we ended up with some pics like this: (oh shit, these are my hands!)
After that we did some awesome remote-pointing shots, where I randomly held an old-school remote and pointed it at nothing. We also attempted some intense dice-throwing action shots (edgy, I know), but it was hard to time the throw just right so the pictures came out blurry. We did a few more basic stock photos, then I attempted to paint over my manicure.
My nail-painting method usually consists of me haphazardly slopping on coats of paint, then peeling the polish that got on the edges of my nails the next day after a shower. Unfortunately, I underestimated the difficulty of painting on a factory floor and got red all over my fingers. Sharon was able to photoshop it out, but you can tell from the light reflecting off my nails in this picture that they were less than perfect:
The real picture includes more of my dress, but I don't have the actual file, only a collage on my comp card, which is sort of a visual resume for models, that agents hand out to prospective clients.
The last picture we did was this one:
I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but the picture turned out pretty well. Incidentally, Sharon mentioned that some hand models actually take out insurance on their hands, so if they get crushed or something they can get so many years' pay. Unless you had the holy grail of hands I feel like it wouldn't be worth it, although I need to start wearing gloves when I cat-sit for the neighbors, because one of those bitches scratched up my hand. I'm thinking these:
I think I have been to that building before. My dad went there to get some pictures taken and I went with him :-)
Posted by: Ally Hanes | 08/03/2010 at 12:14 PM