Rasha Ruzk.
No, it’s not a serious lighting kit, a good portrait lens or a make-up artist, it’s good general knowledge. You need to be able to converse with people about just about anything – and it can be anything from football scores to “does ragù have milk in it?” It not only relaxes the subject, it also buys you some time while you adjust your lights, change your portrait lens or have a make-up artist do their thing – hey I didn’t say that you didn’t need a serious lighting kit, a good portrait lens or a make-up artist…
In this case with the lovely jazz and opera singer Rasha Ruzk, it was all about jazz. Rasha is a music professor, so Charlie Parker plays the Cole Porter soundtrack was the closest thing to jazz standards I had on my MacBook Pro. She felt pretty at ease during the shoot, even though she was about to go on stage to a packed house at the Arthouse hotel in Damascus (which has a wonderfully eclectic music performance program). She even said that seeing the photos made her more confident about her choice of dress and makeup for the night. She has done heaps of portrait sessions and asked me quite a few questions about how I achieved that lovely soft background look. It was a good shoot.
Later that night after the performance I went over to thank her for the performance. The local newspaper photographers were taking her photo – their on-camera flashes pointing right at her. However, she must have remembered my statement that “nothing good can come from using an on-camera flash pointed straight at your subject.” After they photographed her she was checking their camera viewfinders and saying “naam, la, la” (“yes, no, no”) as the photographers scrolled through the images. Oops.
I beat a hasty retreat.
