It’s almost impossible not to turn your head when someone with a presence like Faye walks past you. I felt all of New York staring at us while walking through the streets of Manhattan. After the first amazing shoot in a tiny hotel room in Toronto with Ms. Faye, I had to fly her down to New York to shoot in three hotels and a studio. It was an incredible pleasure for me to have her spend the weekend working with me, shooting some high end work, and lots of intime work. The fabulous high end makeup was done by the super talented Nancy Lan.

The moment I saw flashes outside my window, I grabbed my 5D with 16-35mm 2.8L, remote and tripod. I wanted to create a time lapse, so each frame had to be fast enough shutter to allow enough frames, rather than low ISO and long shutter speeds. Each frame is ISO 400, f/13 at 5.6 seconds. The view is out my balcony in Fort Lee, NJ.

I remember my first session three years ago with this model at her college apartment, and she was nervous and inexperienced. Her apartment was small and dim, with a headboard that was crooked. We stayed in the bedroom for our shoot. I brought Jocelyn with me to keep her company and to encourage her, as they took turns modeling so the pressure wasn’t entirely on one person. Jocelyn would soon end up walking around topless being a helpful assistant to me, as we worked on shooting her in some lingerie. When she was finally able to see some of the final images on the computer, she was shocked at first and was uncomfortable seeing herself in such revealing images. A year would pass before she contacted me again for another shoot at my studio, this time she was a lot more confident, and the shoot was a ton of fun. Another year would pass as we just had our third session, this time at the Royalton Hotel in New York City. The images may be relatively simple in concept and execution, but without the confidence and chemistry the model and I had established, the result would have been unnatural and posed.