On March 15th I did a photo shoot with photographer Jeremy Nelson and models David Thomas and Tyler Hilderbrand. The shoot was actually supposed to feature two female models as well for an editorial in INK Magazine.
I arrived at Jeremy's apartment on the Upper East Side to get my hair and makeup groove on before taking the crew out to shoot in Central Park on the gloriously sunny mid-March afternoon. The boys showed up and I perfected their skin and primped their hair. We all sat around discussing philosophy while we waited for the girls who never showed. Although we were having a wonderfully interesting conversation, we finally decided to shoot the guys alone.
We walked a few blocks west to the park and found a gorgeous tree that begged to be climbed. The boys set about finding their footing up the slick bark that was mottled and looked like camouflage. David and Tyler were perched in the tree as Jeremy checked his light settings when all of sudden I see this flash of blonde hair falling as David took a tumble down to the ground. He was alright, but did get a scrape on his arm. Of course, my concern was that he didn't get any blood on his white t-shirt. I dabbed away the blood and he scrambled back up (see my picture on the bottom in the above set) and Jeremy got some single and pair shots of the guys.
When Tyler was doing his individual shots, I noticed that he had the eyes of Jared Leto, who of course played my dream boy Jordan Catalano in My So Called Life. To my horror, Tyler had no idea who I was talking about when I mentioned this. These are the moments when I am made painfully aware of my age on photo shoots.
Once we had enough shots of the tree, we meandered north through the park discussing baseball and girls. We came across a nice little corner with a stream that created a small waterfall among moss-covered stones. We all started shedding layers at this point and I was attempting to get a tan to no avail. They splashed around in the water and posed for a bit before getting some shots in an old brick-lined tunnel that was adjacent to the stream.
Our foursome followed the stream a little further to get some nice shots on fallen logs that spanned the water. David gave us his best Dirty Dancing impression of Patrick Swayze showing Baby how to achieve balance and he even sang "Hey Baby". It was pretty amazing and you can see a little of it in the first picture above.
We wrapped up our shoot there and headed back for some $5 footlongs at Jeremy's place. The day didn't end up being exactly what we had planned for, but the shots turned out nice and we had a great time. I gotta say, working with a group of all guys can be a lot more laid back and fun sometimes. We all just goofed around and played for most of the shoot. I hope you guys like the pictures!
Here is a link to the spread in the Spring 2010 issue of INK Magazine. It starts on page 47
