[ozma]

We arrived in the basement studio around 10:30. Nam was cleaning-up, bemoaning the messiness of the dancers before him, and setting up his backdrops, lights, defusers, strobe, syncs and so on. First we'd be shooting on his huge unrolled white backdrop to focus all the emphasis on my gold and coins. This would be slower movements and portraiture. We'd be doing veils, spins, and more lively shots for the second costume.

He asked to see the costumes and I unpacked them, explaining my general desires about what I wanted for each one. I explained how I wanted slow and sensual/ portrait styled stuff for my coin set and wanted more movement, performance and action shots with my lighter tribaret set with full skirts and veil. We talked about backdrops and he carefully clipped up my veil to help hang out the wrinkles.

We talked for a while more (mostly about the fact that I read and write Japanese, which helped when setting up this shoot, and how that came to be) and then I got into my coins.

Momo put together the finishing touches on my make-up and costume. This included false fingernails of dragon-lady proportions. My nails are usually kept fairly short. I no longer chew my nails, but the art, knitting, crafts, sewing, cooking and general handiwork I engage in requires them to be kept manageable. These new nails rendered me helpless. Additional pinning, tucking, manipulating or gratuitous use of my opposeable thumbs required assistance.

About this time I realized that the Costume 1 cd had never been burned and that I had two cds of "Costume 2". I tried a few other cds before setling on George Abdo. When you're going for retro...who else?

I spent time in front of the mirror thinking "These are not my beautiful hands. These are not my beautiful lips. How did I get here?" as Momo and Nam conferred and set up. They've worked together before with Henna, Farasha, Eshe, Mishaal and probably a few other dancers I know.

Our main setback was that the power supply for Nam's strobe/flash/sync was unusually slow that night, so the time between possible shots was longer than normal. I had to be somewhat aware of this downtime so that I didn't leave a pose or movement he was enjoying before he could shoot it. Being aware of this threw me off for a while, as having to be aware kicks in my "I'm being photographed" brain. Nam also gave me direction, but due to the fact that the music was loud and my focus wasn't on Japanese, it was hard for me to understand what he was saying. We ended up finding a mix of English and Japanese to work best.

And then his strobe/flash/sync blew an internal fuse.