Mark Knopp is a Virginia-Beach-based portrait photographer and photography teacher that covers the Hampton Roads community and beyond. Contact him today at mknopp1@cox.net for all your photographic needs.
I recently met up with Sarah and Jordan at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach on a warm, breezy May day. It was cold and rainy for almost a week beforehand but it all went away on the day of the session.
I’ve known Sarah for a couple years now but never had the pleasure of meeting Jordan until our consultation day. It was apparent from the moment we all met that it was going to be an epic session. We agreed to a beach session, made plans, and counted the days until go time.
Jasmyne and her team recently reached out to me in regards to getting her modeling career started. We had long discussions about what genres/areas she wanted to be involved with and what would be involved to get there. We then created a plan to build a photo portfolio showing off those aspects. Of course these things take time to create so we broke it down further to focus on just urban fashion in Town Center for our first session.
She sent me pictures of the outfits she thought would work for such a session and I gave my input. With a plan in place she then set up times with a hair stylist and make-up artist to polish off the total look we were going after. I can’t stress enough how important these things are as they are the icing on the proverbial cake. Every detail has to be in place.
So many things are swirling around in my head right now as I try to write this entry about my session with Kristin Smith. She was amazing. Stunning. Graceful. Gregarious.
But I have to be careful as I don’t want to set this up as a rare occurrence with a one-in-a-million kind of person. Which she is, don’t get me wrong. But the reason why this session was such a success was because we both came prepared.
Sometimes a session goes so well, you can’t wait to do another one. Such was the case with Jennifer Pascual. She’s an up and coming model based in Virginia Beach. She’s currently in New York City working Fashion Week and working with photographers up there as I type this.
We teamed up for her first ever beach session earlier in the season. During a review of the images we discussed what worked and what could be worked on in terms of posing, et cetera, to do better next time. This woman wants to be tops in her craft and is like a sponge, absorbing as much information as she can get to improve.
Valerie is no stranger to the local modeling scene as she has walked in numerous shows and worked with several, very talented, photographers. Sadly, I wasn’t one of them. We have several friends in common and but our paths never crossed until I got a message from her recently.
During our chat she revealed that she had never done a beach portrait session. It was something she has always wanted to do but never got the opportunity. Talk about a match made in Heaven. We quickly set up a time to meet up.
A typical conversation between someone looking to do a session and myself involves several texts, phone calls, and/or skype sessions to establish a rapport, cover topics like expected outcomes, limits of exposure, outfits, make-up and hair style appropriate for such a session, availability, and so on. I then get everything set up, go over last minute issues and such right up to the start of the session.
The whole point of that is to point out that setting up a session takes some time. Days. Weeks even.
When people like Carrie contacts me, our messages typically go like this:
Carrie: Hi Mark, I was wondering…
Me: Let’s do it. When are you free?
