Divided #3 – Day 7

When you are working on a project like this you know that you will hit the wall every so often and that things don’t always work out. But day 3 to day 7 were a pretty rough ride. It started out with really bad weather on Friday, which was frustrating but at least gave Elias the chance to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC.

A bit more problematic was the fact that a public affairs lady at the Navy in Norfolk, who had agreed for us to come there and shoot portraits of seamen, had not received the paperwork we had sent her a few days before. Consequently our plan to drive to Norfolk on Sunday to shoot there on Monday got canceled. Our plan B was to shoot in Falls Church on Saturday, a suburb of DC and the richest county in the US. Too bad it was extremely windy that day and we just couldn’t find a place to set up our studio that was enough wind protected. So we had to abandon that plan as well.

Rather frustrated, we drove to DC to show Elias at least the White House. It turned out to be a good idea. We met Bruce in front of the White House, a homeless man, who comes every single day to protest Trump and to tell people what he thinks about Trump. He was more than happy to be photographed and we even found a wind protected spot in a passage way of an office building. So our Saturday was saved after all. After the shoot we granted Elias one of his biggest wishes: To try out one of the many electro shooters that are standing around all over the US capital.

On Sunday the weather was perfect and so we set out to make good on the portrait we wanted to shoot in Falls Church. It didn’t take long and we found the perfect model in a coffee shop. A young and pretty all-American girl, who was working in DC. While she was having lunch, we started to set up the studio. It all went very well until we found out, that we had lost 4 small rods that were essential to set up our back drop. A fancy backdrop that we had bought in New York, that can be lit from the inside and that works perfectly well – unless you loose these four rods. And since the backdrop was a special order we knew it would be extraordinarily hard to get these parts again. We apologized to our model for not being able to do the shoot, then Mathias had a fit and Monika decided to go back to DC to look for these parts. While Mathias argued that this was pointless, Monika’s stubbornness proved to be once again what saved us. She really did find the parts. But after all this drama we had enough of Washington DC and got on our way towards Appalachia.

After a very cold night in the van (outside temperature 2 C, inside only a bit more) on a camping in the beautiful Shenandoah National Park, we were heading towards West Virginia, the poorest state of the US.

In the first town we stopped, we found a fantastic waitress who volunteered to be photographed. All was perfect except for the fact that our main flash light with the big para-light former was thrown over by a gust of wind that came out of nowhere. The glass dome shattered into a thousand pieces. But at least we were lucky enough that the flash tube stayed intact. We finished the shoot with the wrecked lamp that was put back in service that evening with a set of tools by Mathias.

You can’t always be lucky, but we sure hope it’s going to get better from here on….