I think sometimes you have to celebrate your challenges and failures along side of your victories. This session was a challenging one across the board. Ruby and I may have locked in this shoot over a month ago, but a week ago she let me know that she just wasn’t feeling as energetic as usual and wanted to take things a bit more low-key than the costume shoot we had planned.

Cool. No problem. I’m here to do the work. I don’t care all that much what I’m doing, as long as I’m doing it. Also I prefer to test new equipment on more “low stakes” shoots anyway (not to brag, but most of the time I really do like being a photo industry secret agent and getting to play with pre-release toys…this will come back to bite me in just a few seconds).

I’m not sure what happened this time around, but I think I was fighting my equipment from the first frame. My first mistake was thinking I could use good quality lights with a poor quality modifier. I’m spoiled I guess with having access to better equipment, but I still can’t believe I can notice a difference with something I relied on not too many years ago. However, that was only the first battle. No matter what troubleshooting I did I kept having blank frames where my strobes just didn’t fire. I have some troubleshooting to do, and even though I’m happy with what we ended up getting, I’m still a little disappointed we had to cut things short (even if it did mean we did get more time mobbing around a new antique store and Target for the afternoon).

Shortly after working with Golden Mystique a few weeks back, Roula Roulette reached out to get something on the books. If you are a long time reader of the blog (or know how to filter posts by key word) you may have seen some various shots of her in action (To be fair I only remembered this while I was making this post because I already had a tag in my system with her name on it…but I digress).

When I asked Roula what ideas she wanted to explore, she said she had a “Spaghetti dress” that needed to be shot for promotional materials. Little did I know what I was in for.

We spent a wonderful morning laughing and cutting up while her partner played DJ and knocked out some side work. I learned the story of how they became a member of the Atlanta burlesque community, and more importantly became a key part in the training and support of the next (and the next, and the next) generation of performers.

So without further ado, take a look at what we made together. And remember, when you’re here in the studio…you’re family. Or something.

Ruby Marx - 2023.

Roula Roulette - 2023.