On Friday, I had the pleasure of shooting with a new photography team that I hadn’t worked with before. The photographer and I had been in touch and tried to plan something before, but our schedules finally worked out this past weekend.
One of the final product photos, shot and edited by David Superville
He suggested shooting in a wildlife preserve, where sunflowers and corn stretch in rows toward the sky. I thought it sounded like a nice place to shoot, so I agreed, and he warned me that even though we were shooting in the evening, it would be hot. Because it has rained a lot recently, he said that it would probably be muddy, too.
I was blown away by the amount of sunflowers, so I took this as soon as we got there!
I thought, why not use the mud? So, we did, and we ended up shooting a progression of me getting muddier and muddier, with fewer and fewer layers of clothing. I’m attaching a link here to a post with more pictures from the shoot, tagged with “nsfw” because although I am not nude, there are photos where I’m just wearing underwear and a lot of mud.
It was also super hot when we started! The mud cooled me down later :)
We started shooting, and the ground was a bit drier in the fields than we expected. There were patches of mud closer to a lake in the area, but we wanted to stay by the fields for as long as we could have the light. We brought jugs of water to make our own mud right there, and as I was rolling my legs and the hem of my dress in the mud, I suddenly felt my leg burn. I realized that I had rolled my left leg right into a fire ant mound!
If you’re not familiar with the fire ants in the Carolinas, they are small but vicious. The little black ants build unnecessarily large mounds and swarm out at the slightest disturbance. They bite, then sting the bite with their own fiery ant venom, and I am still paying for my mistake of hitting their nest.
Yeah, they did a number on me...
We didn’t let that stop us from shooting, and I think the mud was actually helpful in dulling the pain or drawing out the toxins until I could get home and deal with it. Later, when we moved to shoot in one of the mud pits, I had the relief of the cool mud on a hot night. I was hesitant at first, but once I committed to getting dirty, it was surprisingly refreshing!
This was a combined shoot where we had a team that included me, another girl to help me get my looks together, the photographer, and a cinematographer. This is the cinematographer, along with the photographer's tripod.
If you want to see more photos, check out this post (tagged nsfw because of underwear, not because of nudity) and keep following me because I’ll probably include more photos in my future stories!
xo,
Cecilia