Wee!Last week I spent time preparing for a photo shoot that my friend Lilani (the dancer) and I have discussed for a while. We chose a date two months ago and it finally happened this past Saturday! Lilani is a trained ballet dancer and we wanted to capture ballet poses done by her around San Francisco, a city in which she frequently visits for her close friends.

To prepare for the shoot, I spent a good part of Thursday scouting out locations in San Francisco around the same time we'd shoot on Saturday. This allowed me to see the lighting and how it would work for our shoot. And San Francisco is always congested on weekends, so I wanted to make sure we weren't around places that were TOO crowded, even though some places I wanted were iconic parts of SF.

Here are some shots I took while scouting:

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I had other places in mind, but I have shot at them before and was familiar with the locations beforehand. I also reached out to a yoga studio in the heart of Union Square called Maiden Lane Studios, a beautiful yoga studio I had taken classes at before to see if I could shoot there and they were so gracious and nice about it. I also made notes in my sketchbook about what the temperatures were and how the sun was casting down. This allowed me to pack appropriately and for Lilani to figure out what to wear.

As I'm working on processing photos from the shoot, I wanted to show some behind the scenes photos and outtakes. The candid photos are always so sweet and fun to see.

Special thanks to: Andrea for being the best BFF to Lilani with hair, holding of all the stuff and her wardrobe, Jarhod for helping me with metering, shots, carrying of camera, second set of eyes and making sure we didn't get hit by cars and for Ian for the transportation and keeping us safe.