Portrait Session at the JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel
After photographing Helena, from the previous post, her sister, Nancy, got in touch saying she would like a portrait session as well. I obviously said yes and we started discussing ideas for locations. Initially she said her preferred location would be the Capsa Hotel on Calea Victoriei, in Bucharest, because it has this beautiful staircase which she really likes. Unfortunately however, we tried asking for permission to shoot at the hotel, but they said no...So we had to come up with something else. Nancy mentioned that when her family is in Bucharest, they usually stay at the JW Marriott Hotel and no one has ever said anything when they were taking photos of eachother or of the hotel itself. Granted, doing a portrait photoshoot normally looks a bit different than just snapping photos with your phone, but we decided to give it a go anyway, this time without asking anyone about it beforehand. As Grace Hopper said, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." And it worked, we ended up shooting at the Marriott and no one even seemed bothered about us. Maybe they thought we were tourists staying at the hotel. The perks of shooting with tiny Fujifilm cameras and lenses!
Now I wonder whether taking the same approach with the first location would have worked.
Below you can see a selection of my favourite photographs taken on this photoshoot. This time I decided to try something a bit different and so I went with a Black and White edit for all the photos taken inside the hotel, mainly because the lighting was pretty poor and not very flattering, but also because taking the colour away removes all distractions and really adds to the images.
Enjoy!
Nancy wanted a few photos with her dad, so we got him involved as well and I am so happy with these next images as you can really see the love and special bond that they share.
For the second part of the photoshoot, Nancy changed her outfit and we headed outside of the hotel where we took a few more photos in which I wanted to get the city and traffic lights into the compositions for a nice artistic effect.