6:00 AM – the alarm goes ‘beeeeeeeep-beeeeeeeep’, rudely interrupting what should have been a nice long beauty sleep. It persists with this bad behaviour for the next thirty minutes and I’m eventually forced to give in. Shower – check, bags packed – check, morning ritual of green tea – check. And then the phone rings ‘come down, we’re here!!’, a chirpy Prarthna says. I go down to see tons of luggage and the girls somewhere behind it all. Prarthna (who we shall fondly call psingh) is a very talented photographer. And with her the lovely, always smiling and sneezing Mehma who is an amazing stylist. So off we go, ready to face the day of this long planned shoot.
As we reach the studio we have team Fat Mu ready and waiting. Sunita leads the show for us today with her assistant Jaspreet and Prajakta and Vaibhav for hair. As soon as we step into the studio, everyone is dying to attend to nature’s call but we’re informed the water doesn’t come on until 10 am…a whole 2 hours away… at least we all got some exercise that day…so what if they were bladder exercises? To distract ourselves, we got straight down to business: the clothes are ironed and sorted, shoes laid out, make up, hair, references, lighting, backgrounds discussed and off we went ready to shoot.
Of course, there can never be a shoot without music so we begin the day with the Beatles and progress to R&B and of course electronic music! The Beatles worked well with our first look – color blocking, sweet candy fresh girl. As the day went by we moved on to my 40’s/50’s look, explosive bombshell/vixen look, Indian look and finally the insane/outrageous Brit pop rock look. Incase you’re scratching your head and saying but that doesn’t sound like a portfolio, you’re right. The reason for this shoot wasn’t to make it a typical portfolio…the idea was for me to not be ‘Ramona’, but to be a character. And to all those of you who said I couldn’t carry off any of these looks cuz I’m too much of a cool chic, girl next door, plane Jane and what not… here goes – I ain’t an actress for nothing! 😉
It was a tough hard and long day with these 5 completely different looks to perfect and capture. But this was a truly amazing team – we had lots of fun though at the end of 12 hours, we were all ready to collapse. The journey home took 2 and a half hours instead of 30 minutes thanks to the Ganesh Visarjan – but I guess he blessed our day with prosperity because the end results have all of us way beyond thrilled. Here’s hoping you like them too!!
A Huge thank you to a fabulous team, here’s what they have to say:
Prarthna Singh (Photographer) :
The Shoot: The shoot was slightly stinky at first but smelled like roses and lavender by the end 🙂
Personal Favorite Look: The Candy Sweet Color Blocking in the red dress
On Ramona: Lovely to work with especially since she trusted our vision and wasn’t interfering at all.
Mehma Tibb (Stylist) :
The Shoot: I think we pulled off a very successful shoot and the most important reason for it was that we were all on the same page and very honest with each other at all times. No ego clashes and all input was welcome.
Personal Favorite Look: Most definitely the 50’s…Ramona looked like a mega superstar from that era ;). The sexy vixen look too was very HOT!
On Ramona: Ramsy is fun, lovely, easy to work with, very flexible and HAS to not worry about her gorgeous, beautiful "fair" skin. She is also the first person I shot with back in the day so I guess that’s pretty cool. 🙂
Sunita (Mad Mu Make Up) :
The Shoot: fab energy…..fab team!!!!
Personal Favorite Look: the smoky eyes had to be my fav…thought it looked fab on Ramona.
On Ramona: unconventional, loves to experiment, a dream to work with!
Special thanks to the lovely Virginia Holmes of Mad Mu. And also to the spots, the clothes dada and lighting dada.