Today’s shoot was about a lumpen Barbie peddler/pimp, whose character was  marvelously executed by Julia Beydoun. A brilliant Detroit fashion designer Perry Jamison did the styling, and a talented photographer Charan Singh shot our backstage.

We were shooting in Detroit Greektown, and for a change, I wanted to use my Broncolor Mobilite portable powerpack for a Film Noir look. A routine equipment  test before packing, went fine, but after putting the lighting setup together, we discovered that the pack was unquestionably dead. It was dead like it meant it. First it felt like a disaster, then I looked around and realized that we still had options. Even though for this kind of shoot I usually prefer a rangefinder camera, this time, just to be on a safe side, I took Leica SL and 50mm f/1 Noctilux combo as a backup. Also, the moment that we came to the location could not be more perfect: it was twilight, when it was still reasonably bright, but all the lights were already on. The model was already in position, and the light on her was even better than I envisioned it to be with a flash.

The last strike of luck was the police that came just in time and became an unwilling, yet greatly appreciated participant of our performance. It took us two hours to prepare, ten minutes to shoot and five minutes to run images through Adobe Lightroom. Thanks to Leica SL, which is an excellent low-light camera (Much better than M9, if you ask me), the shoot did take place, despite a flash failure.