Portraits/Expressions

"Facing death"
I'm living in Mexico since 2020 and I've always dreamed to have a photoshoot with a "catrina" but since I'm not to much into portraits, not having the budget to pay a model and not knowing a good location, I din't put this photoshoot on my to do list. But last year the stars aligned and out of nowhere I've seen a Facebook post about a marigold flower field at around 30km from my house. I've saved that post and started looking for a model within my friends. It didn't took to much to find out that a good friend of mine participated with her "catrina" costume at the anual catrina's contest in our town. Since she won that contest she was more than happy to be my model. I wanted to shoot at sunset and started to plan the shooting day. I usually don't plan a lot and I like to go with the flow, improvise and for this photoshoot I've asked my friend if she can bring some accessories like some candles and some skulls that she has in her house.
The day has come, we met each other at 5pm and we left to the location with the plan to be there at 5.30pm (1 hour before sunset), but after 15km I've realized that I forgot my flashes at home and I had to turn around to get them, with the risk of losing the good light. So the race against clock began. We managed to get at the location just when the sun has gone :\ and mosquitos start to wake up....and there were a ton of them. I had some left over repelant in my truck, but not nearly enough so we had to literally fight with them, the time and other photographers that had the same kind of shooting at the same hour as us. Meanwhile my friend was getting ready I started to preapare my gear. At that moment I had my Canon 5d mark IV with a 24-70mm f2.8 USM II lens, a 80 inch Godox Soft box and a speedlight. I can’t remember exactly how much time we spend on this shooting but I think this was the shortest I’ve ever done. In the and I was glad of the end result. My friend was amazing, the sky coloured very beautiful, but the hard work was about to start next day in post processing part. I had to remove a ton of mosquitos from the shots and find the perfect balance of colour grade and some subtle photoshop touch.