We're having an amazing time at our new studio – as I was just telling a new client today, after a couple of weeks being there, the new studio just today began feeling like 'ours'.  There's usually a brief period of awkwardness, as every shooting room has a decidedly unique light 'acoustic', but I have to say that out of every studio we've shot from, this one immediately fit like a glove.  Different sized or shaped rooms require smaller or larger lighting modifiers and it's actually been a good deal of fun testing out different lighting configurations.

The Norman LH500 strobes that we're using in studio are just wonderful.  Our older studios required humungous 2000 watt/second power packs and umbrellas the size of me to overpower all of the ambient light and the huge warehouse space we used to rent back in the day (which always seemed to result in a burned out pack, modeling light or flash tube every week), so the opportunity to have a scaled down lighting setup and still achieve the same results is a breath of fresh air (and please forgive my ever-present camera geekery – I promise I'll refrain next time and get right to the pictures )

If you're friends with us on Facebook, you may have seen my little tour of our new place and if so, our model Erica may be familiar, as the client in our makeup and wardrobe room, along with our amazing makeup artist Christa.  Before I get to the photos, I would like to give Christa a very big nod; the quality of her work is uncanny and her rates are excellent, but most of all, her personality has always left us and our clients with a very big smile!  Since we began working with Christa, she has provided flawless professional makeup for well over 150 of our clients and watching her in action is akin to watching a master painter or sculptor at work.  I cannot recommend her enough!

Not only was Erica beautiful, but she was made for the camera.  In fact, she even bears an uncanny resemblance to the famous model Carmella Decesare and I could easily see her career take off just as quickly.  Her personality could switch from pure and light hearted to sultry in the blink of an eye and throughout the entire shoot, we all chatted like old friends and had such a good time that I didn't even realize that we had shot almost until 10pm!  But in that time, we had the opportunity to try out a goodly amount of fun light setups and concepts, including a semi-duplication of the famous bar scene with Jessica Alba in the movie interpretation of Sin City (the name of which is ironic, as Las Vegas is often dubbed 'sin city').

While processing the shoot, I decided that a shoot like this begs for a fog machine to complement the colored background lighting and will be picking up a very nice unit in time for our next studio shoot.  We're hoping to work with Erica again, as the experience was just wonderful for all of us!