Marysia
Marysia is a model from Scotland whose home page I found while looking for models on the Internet. She came down to London for a weekend. We went shopping on Oxford Street and picked up the lavender outfit, the grey dress, and the "Saucy" underwear, among other things, and then I photographed her wearing those clothes and also some clothes that she had brought. She was a lot of fun to work with.
Marysia also writes, sings, plays the guitar, and manages a number of webrings related to photography and modeling.
With a few rare exceptions that are noted, all of the color photos were shot with my Bronica SQ-Ai on Kodak Portra 400VC film. (If I had to do it again, I'd use 160VC.) All of the black and white photos were shot on Ilford XP2 Super using the Bronica except where noted.
Click on the thumbnails to view the enlargements. The photos of Marysia fall into two categories, those that I've either printed myself or had professionally printed, and those that I scanned in from the minilab prints. The difference in quality is considerable, particularly in terms of vividness and contrast. The scans from the larger prints are themselves larger. Over time I hope to replace all of the minilab print scans with scans of full-size photos.
These are the photos of Marysia wearing the lavender outfit that we bought at a place called, I think, Top
Shop. The more I saw of this outfit, the better I liked it! The first four are scanned from professional 8x10
prints; the last is scanned from a minilab print.
This outfit belonged to Marysia. The first photo was inspired by a photo of Kate Moss by Sante D'orazio
in his book A Private View.
Marysia asked me to take some photos with her guitar. (Okay, this one is my guitar, but she has one at
home in Scotland.) The difference between the first two is that Marysia has her eyes closed in the second.
The three black and white photos were taken with my $39 Lubitel 166 Universal. The second black and
white photo was printed by yours truly at the Drill Hall; the first two are minilab prints and the third is a
lab print.
We bought this dress at the same place as the lavender outfit. It was marked down 50% to start, but but
this example was missing its lining, making it see-through, and so we asked for a discount and got another
50% off. Unfortunately the dress didn't really live up to my expectations, or maybe I didn't know how
best to put it to use. These are my least-favorite photos from the weekend. The second one I printed at
the Drill Hall; the others are minilab prints.
We saw this pair of underwear (it says "Saucy" in pink letters) for £2 and thought it would be fun to
photograph. This set was taken with my Olympus OM-4T at the end of the shoot so that I could burn up
the rest of a roll of Kodak Select 100.
We found this beaded thing at a little shop on the corner of Beak and Carnaby Street in Soho. I asked
Marysia if she'd be willing to model it just by itself, and she said sure, so we bought it. It looked quite
good on her although I suspect that she'll find few opportunities to wear it in public! The second pose is
familiar because I liked the way it looked with the green lace thing. The color photos are lab prints. The
first two black and whites are mine (I like the second one better and will probably lighten the first one).
The last is a minilab print.
Outtakes
Marysia checks her make-up. I didn't have the heart to blind her with the flash at a range of six inches for
this photo, so I guesstimated the exposure and wound up maybe a stop short.
The lighting setup for the lavender outfit.
Last updated November 19, 2001