Hotties and Harleys

I'm beat.

Exhausted.

Toast.

Worked a 15-hour shoot yesterday.

We shot in an auto body shop. The building's "swamp cooler" cooling system wasn't happening. Temperatures inside the location reached 104° F during the afternoon. (40° C for some of you.)

But it was a dry heat, okay?

Yeah, like that made any difference.

I didn't shoot the pretty girl photographs for this project. I was the director/HD video operator. I was gonna also shoot the stills but, two days before production, my production manager called and suggested, "Why don't we hire another photographer?"

I resisted.

The PM went on, "You'll make the same money for the day."

I continued resisting. After all, shooting the "pretty girls" is what I love doing best.

The PM added, "It will make for a much shorter day."

Shorter day?

I relented.

A "much shorter day" turned out to be fiction: A sounded-good-in-theory false prediction.

A lie.

Had I not relented, of course, that 15-hour day probably would have turned into something more. Something longer. Something uglier. Something that would have meant I'd still, as I write this, be in bed, semi-comatose. (It's 10:58 A.M. as I write this.)

As the day progressed and temperatures soared everyone began working slower. Much slower. (Except the PM who sat most of the day at a desk in a small, air conditioned, office at the auto body shop.)

The desk and office belongs to Joey Buttafuco. But Joey wasn't there yesterday. He was smarter than us, spending his day lounging at a pool, sipping Coronas and admiring young, nubile, women in bikinis. While we had plenty of young, nubile, (sweaty) women of our own to admire, Joey's day sounds more relaxing and enjoyable. Certainly cooler.

We went through (I don't how many) cases of bottled water! Also lots of towels to dry off the models/performers. It was like shooting in a sauna.

A dry sauna, of course.

Again, like that makes a difference.

Thematically, this would-be-masterpiece of the erotic cinema (not) involves young hotties and roaring Harleys. They go together, right? Hotties and Harlies? Add to the bikes and babes some hard-riding biker-dudes and, voilà, an allegorical sex-epic emerges like magic, almost on its own.

I thought about adding guns to the saga--guns, chicks, and Harleys make for even more titillating imagery--but guns cost money. (To rent, that is.) Plus, blank ammo ain't cheap! (Something we definitely weren't budgeted for.) Besides, if we had guns and plenty of blank ammo we would have had so much fun shooting the half-naked chicks shooting the fully-faux-loaded guns that we would have shot ourselves in the feet, time-wise.

Yes. I know this stuff from personal experience.

I shouldn't overly complain. Yesterday was a good payday, despite the long hours and brutal heat.

Besides, it was a dry heat. Right?

I should be back to writing about photography for my next update. Just thought I'd share my yesterday with you all, as interesting (or not) as it might be.

The pretty girl at the top, mounted on a rice-burner rather than a Harley, is my good pal, Kori, from a few years ago. Shot it during my (fortunately short-lived) red and yellow gel phase. Her right arm looks like it's growing out of her face. Oh well. The red and yellow gels didn't work out too well either.