Taking It to the Streets with Spirited Rebel for an Urban Fashion Photo Session in Norfolk.

Sometimes it all clicks together and magic happens.

Spirited Rebel is a familiar face on this page. That’s because, whenever we team up, we create something special. The game gets elevated. This Urban Fashion session in downtown Norfolk was not an exception.

Now, I’ve been using the term Urban Fashion for a while now. In my mind, it’s a genre where we take fashion to the literal streets and incorporate the street environment into the outfits, posing, and style of the shoot.

The thing is, there are so many settings to shoot this. Here in Hampton Roads, for one example, we have the clean and modern streets of Virginia Beach Town Center. There is a distinct, open, vibe there where modern, upscale, evening fashion shows best, at least in my humble opinion.

But then, just down 264 a bit, there’s downtown Norfolk and its alleys. Brick and grit, I call it. Close walls of various materials. The alleys are dirty and dark. Stained and smelly. Literally smelly if the garbage hasn’t been collected from all those restaurants.

I never wear good clothes at these sessions cos I’m usually kneeling or sitting on the streets to get the shots. As soon as I get home, they come off and go right into the washer for a good cleaning.

So when Spirited reached out to me with some fashion ideas she had, I knew exactly where to meet up and do the session.

So we are doing our thing right out there for the world to see. People are walking and driving by. Some offer encouragement to Spirited which was awesome. She brought a video person with her to capture that aspect of the session which was awesome. I suck at that part. If I’m in photo mode, I’m shooting. I forget all about video until we are done and I’m on the way home.

side note – One of the many benefits of working at this location is that you can do both available light and strobe work. The only difference is a couple steps in or out of the shadows. Want it to look like it’s night? Step into the ally and turn on the strobes. Boom, it’s night time even though, in this case, it was 2 in the afternoon.

So we’re making magic and then this police officer approaches us. Let me just say that I have had nothing but great interactions with Norfolk PD. This was no exception. He saw Spirited’s warning tape outfit and asked if we would like to use his police SUV as a backdrop for a few images.

Hell yes. Thank you very much. We got a few images done quickly because we didn’t want to hold him up and thanked him profusely. We wrapped up our session soon after that.