Bottle Top Bikini: Part 2 - "Look a Super-Model"

This is the second of the bottle top swimsuit shoots, as designed by James Lee.   See previous post for more details about the swimsuits.
This shoot was with Malyssa and was shot in the water just off the causeway at the Blue Hole park end.  It was shot late evening.  As expected there was a lot of traffic crossing the causeway and hence a lot of horn tooting, yelling and a group of tourists who pulled their convoy of rental bikes to the side of the road and could be heard talking amongst themselves, "Look a super-model."  Needless to say Malyssa loved all the attention.  LOL.

Bottle Top Bikini: Part 1 - Cave Woman

About this time last year I had the idea to create a bikini out of bottle tops.  I put out a request for people to start saving their tops instead of discarding them.  Shortly after that request I got a message from James Lee asking what I was planning on doing with the bottle tops, he mentioned he was also collecting them and oddly enough was in the process of creating a line of swimsuits from them.  In the end I never got enough caps or found the time to create the bikini.   James, however, continued with the idea and now has about 30 designs and several finished bikinis.  He asked me if I was still keen on the idea of shooting the bikini and whether I'd like to shoot some of his, rather than create my own.   I'm pretty sure I would never get around to creating my own and if I did there is no telling how hideous it would look, so I took him up on his offer.  Together we agreed on the models and concepts.  This is the first shoot we did.  The model is Sarafina, who I had previously shot back in February, she was one of the models in the lip tattoo shoot.

Rayneisha's Pool Party

Rayneisha and I have been planning this shoot since March.  We were discussing the details for the previous shoot we did, when Rayneisha showed me a picture of this brightly colored swimsuit.   It immediately screamed David Lachapelle.   So we started planning a second shoot that was to include multiple people, some crazy things going on and lots of bright colours.

Darius (Wilhelmina) - in Ralph Lauren Polo

I've known Darius since about 2008 when he used to live here.  At that time he wasn't a professional model and was in the process of building his portfolio.   I was new to shooting fashion and models, so finding interested models wasn't easy,  Darius was one of the few models willing to take a chance and shoot with me.
We shot 3 or 4 times between 2008 and 2009.   In 2010 he left Bermuda to model professionally in South Africa and is now signed with Wilhelmina in California.

We bumped into each other last week,  at the model workshop where he was a guest speaker.   At one point he handed out his comp cards to the models and to my surprise one of the four images on the back was one of the shots we'd taken way back in 2008.  Later on he showed me his printed portfolio which also includes an image that I took. I actually still use this image in my model mayhem portfolio.  Here is a Link

The evolution of the Evolution Fashion Show 2012

For the last two weekends I put shoots and blog posts hold as I've been immersed in following and documenting the City Fashion Festival in photos.  There has been something of interest on most days, and on the days when there has only been rehearsals I've been attending those too.

This blog post is a summary from my perspective of everything Evolution, from when it started with the Casting Calls way back in March, through model boot camps, show rehearsals, the fashion festival and then culminating with the final event, the Evolution Fashion Show, on Saturday July 7th.