Fuck-up on location

OK, perhaps not a complete fuck up, but we essentially shot in the wrong location.

The environment was less kind on the day we shot these.

Heavy wind and occasional rain showers, which equal a nude model getting cooled down fast.

That, again, means minimizing the amount of exposure and choosing your locations carefully in a prioritized sequence, as when a model runs out of juice, like your phone, that’s the end of functionality.

So, when in a place you are unfamiliar with, you start by finding possible locations, shoot an iPhone pic of each, and then select the sequence.

This is a WW2 bunker museum in Hirtshals, Denmark.
The layout is confusing at best and likely crafted to confuse possible attackers.

One of the low-priority and thus last locations was this square pool.

I mistakenly only took a picture of it and did not note the actual GPS position. I thought I could use Apple Photos maps to find the spot again but learned its map function is not accurate enough.

I did find a similar place, but one with cracked flooring and much more windy.

They were designed similarly, and Lilith and I thought this was it, despite it feeling “wrong”, so we shot there.

Only to find the right, less windy, and more clean spot on the way back to the car.

We were too drenched to redo the shot and, at this point, had our sights set on warm coffee and freshly baked pastry, so the prospect of redoing something we had just done was not very attractive.

When you think of it, redoing anything is always less attractive than doing it the first time.

I was not enthusiastic about editing this, likely because the screwup attached some negative emotions to the image. Still, upon closer inspection, I was attracted to the rock pool being lighter than the concrete floor, and decided to try to amplify that and create something slightly alien. And I like this.

One takeaway I learned a long time ago is that it’s dangerous to cull or select images for editing that are too close to the shoot. If you have an emotional attachment or detachment to a specific image or set, you may not be able to evaluate the image's potential objectively.

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