It isn’t often I get the chance to turn midday into midnight. All the more so while shooting inside a historic, century-old, former Isleño home, while working alongside a natural model like Rachel Jacob and a movie set-savvy professional like Rachel Rickoll. In many ways it was a photographer’s dream come true. Rachel J. has pulled duty as a production assistant in numerous local films and recently worked as an associate producer in Atlanta, while Rachel R. can be found working as a second assistant director on feature-length movies filmed in Louisiana. Both were on hand to also videotape the shoot for a special project (actually, a video for me to use as a promotional tool -- how fantastic is that?).

Turning daylight into midnight was the challenge the day of the shoot inside the Cresap-Caserta House, built in 1910 and found on the bucolic tree-lined grounds of Los Isleños Museum (www.losislenos.org), a living-heritage site of local Spanish-Louisiana culture, located on Old Bayou Road in lower St. Bernard Parish about 30 miles from New Orleans. Like most Creole architecture of the day, the Cresap-Caserta House is basically a box-shaped dwelling absent of hallways and with all four rooms connected by doorways. As a result, during the day it’s as bright as hell inside -- ideal for early-1900s families living without electricity but problematic for a photographer aiming for a nighttime vibe.

But if the Cresap-Caserta House is among my favorite shooting environments, chalk it up to its rich architectural aesthetic and the drop-dead gorgeous patina of its antique walls and floors. Unlike several of its brethren Isleño structures that have relocated to the museum grounds and painstakingly (and historically) restored during the past three decades, the Cresap-Caserta House has thankfully been left untouched. Its original wooden walls and plank floors envelop visitors with a warm, ghostly memory of the past. Hollywood movie production companies typically pay mega-bucks for the privilege of shooting inside such an authentic and atmospheric architectural gem. Fortunately for me, I had the blessing of Bill Hyland, executive director of Los Isleños Museum, to conduct a day-long photo shoot inside this historic structure. 

To compete against the close proximity of so many vertical lines in the form of numerous doorways, I had Rachel dress in a flowing white dress. Nothing fancy, mind you, as we weren’t after a glamour or high-fashion look. Instead I wanted the dress to create fluid and smooth organic lines of suggested movement. We kept Rachel’s hair natural and free-flowing; her makeup to a minimum.

Since we started shooting shortly after noon, I needed to shut down the ambient light pouring through the building's six windows in order to create my “midnight” atmosphere. To accomplish this I positioned an off-camera Nikon Speedlight in each of the four rooms and modified each strobe with a shoot-thru umbrella, an 82-inch reflective parabolic umbrella, a 24”-by-24” softbox and a snoot (with 20-degree grid). Speedlights were triggered with my cheapy, Yongnou wireless flash triggers (http://bit.ly/133bdR4). A little fiddling was required to blend the lighting in each room -- I wanted strong highlights in the room in which Rachel was standing; a subtle blend of midtones and shadows in the adjacent rooms through which I would be shooting. Then I adjusted my camera settings until I achieved the effect of nearly zeroing out all of the ambient light while letting the off-camera strobes do virtually all the work of producing the magic midnight hour. I rigged my Nikon D800 with a 28-75mm lens and shot mostly with the following settings: ISO 320 and 1/80 shutter speed at f/10.0 aperture.

Next image is a diagram I created to show the respective placement of lighting used for the photo shoot and the direction/angle of the camera:

The next image shows the photographer’s POV of the composition of the shot I wanted -- this from the previous week when I swung by the Cresap-Caserta House for some pre-shoot reconnaissance. My goal was to capture as much of the old Isleño house as possible, with Rachel standing at the door at the furthest possible point in the distance, her dress slightly illuminated. I wanted the scarred and barren, patina-rich walls and floors to lead the viewer's eye directly to the woman in the flowing white dress.

In the final image below, the ambient and off-camera lighting is balanced to achieve my midnight-blue atmosphere -- and, equally important, our model Rachel is posed at the front door in her flowing white dress, adding essential narrative and mystique, suggested movement and lyricism to the beautiful old house. By comparing the image above with the photograph below, it's easy to see why my model was worth her weight in gold. 
 

Once we had the lighting down (thanks in no small part to Rachel Rickoll, who offered great suggestions on how to tweak and refine the illumination), only minor modifications were needed as Rachel Jacob moved throughout the rooms experimenting with various poses. In the photo below, we used only two lights: a hand-held Speedlight with snoot (left, off-camera) angled from high down toward Rachel to add a noir-like look to her pensive expression, and a softbox-modified strobe in the far-back room (near the door) to backlight the set. We turned off the strobe in the parabolic umbrella that was in the same room in which Rachel is posing to avoid competing with the snoot.

Later Rachel wanted to experiment with what she jokingly dubbed her “Clockwork Orange” get-up (black pants, white blouse, mask and hat) for what turned out to be another creative highlight of the day’s shoot. Of all the images from this wonderfully imaginative and playful series, the one that appealed to me the most was the photo I snapped of Rachel standing motionless, her eyes closed -- her wall shadow looking as though it was moving before she did.

Unfortunately I can’t release the rest of the images because I’m holding them for a special project. But this is what I learned from the shoot: the joy of any true collaboration is the creative ebb and flow of ideas that help push the envelope and often result in stunning and unexpected results. To this end, working with Rachel Jacob and Rachel Rickoll proved a blessing in disguise (and not just the "Clockwork Orange" variety). C’mon, how many photographers get to work with a pair of young and dedicated, talented movie and film-production pros – one of whom happens to also be his model -- who bring their A-game to the set? Color me grateful.