Well, they do say that good things come to those who wait. Yup. That they do.
Back in 2009, I had come across Jillian’s portfolio and immediately put her on my short list of people I wanted to work with. One week in July I contacted her to see if she was able to fill in for another model who canceled last minute. We couldn’t make that weekend shoot happen, but she was interested in working together at some point.
We shot a few messages back for and forth for a few weeks after that, but we just couldn’t nail down a date.
Things got quiet for a couple of months, then in January, 2010, she messaged me to see if we could put something together. After a couple more weeks of back and forth, it looked like finally we were going to shoot in February.
But the North Carolina winter weather would have none of it.
Jillian was living in Charlotte and I was in Greensboro and the February ice storms kept us apart. We tried to reschedule, but Winter and Spring came and went and still no shoot.
Then in June she contacted me again. Since our previous message volley, Jillian had moved to Greensboro, which gave us the opportunity to get together and brainstorm about our shoot beforehand. We met for coffee and I showed her some snaps of a couple locations I had scouted east of Greensboro. We talked about wardrobe and what kind of thing we wanted for our portfolios, set a shoot date for July, and parted company.
As the day got closer, I naturally assumed that some uncontrollable circumstance was going to prevent us from pulling this shoot off: illness, crazy work schedules, planetary asteroid impact… something.
The day before our shoot, the weather forecast was a moving target as is typical around here in the summer. Anything more than 24 hours away is completely impossible to predict with any accuracy and each time I checked, the outlook changed.
The morning of the shoot, weather.com confirmed that afternoon thunderstorms were pretty much a sure thing. When I met Jillian downtown, it was raining but we had already agreed earlier that day: Thunderstorms be damned, we were going to do this!
Instead of the weather interfering, we had Mother Nature working for us as wardrobe consultant, hair stylist, location scout.
Jillian was fantastic to work with. The best images always come from a collaborative effort and Jillian was right there with creative ideas as we worked the locations and the weather. We got out into the rain for a bit, and she even talked me into going inside the collapsing house, all the while making sure neither one of us fell into the giant hole in the ground that for some reason I was determined keep trying to fall into.
Check out some more of Jillian’s work over at Model Mayhem.
