Creative Session in Joshua Tree National Forest, CA with Tattoo Artist & Model Stephanie James
Work recently took me to California and, man, what a trip.
This was only my second time visiting the sunshine state. My first was many years ago and I was only able to see the Hollywood area. On this occasion I was able to explore Palm Springs and a little bit of Joshua Tree National Park, which encapsulated a completely different experience in comparison to my first visit.
If you’re familiar with my work then you’ve probably seen this beautiful lady quite a bit. Stephanie is my best friend, muse, tattoo artist, and a commercial photo client. She reached out and said she was traveling to Palm Springs and wanted to capitalize on her trip with some photoshoots. I was able to work it out with my schedule, she flew me out to California, and we had a BLAST.
Stephanie and I had accommodations at an adorable hotel in Palm Springs called Fleur Noire Hotel. We had a lovely stay and enjoyed everything about our visit, and even had an iPhone photoshoot around the property which was incredibly fun. Check out my Instagram account to see the photos, along with some cute behind the scenes from the whole trip!
Our main goal though was to do a shoot in Joshua Tree National Park. It was a pretty neat drive out there and we made it just in time for sunset. We were able to do three quick outfit changes, ending with the red dress. Speaking of, I gotta give mad props to my girl Stephanie. It was just the two of us so we didn’t have any assistance with the red dress, nor was there any wind that evening. Every bit of the motion that we caught was from Stephanie’s efforts to flip it around while posing. Girl killed it.
The funniest part of the day was realizing we cut it close wrapping up our shoot and having to rush to our dinner reservation. We were kind of a mess and covered in dirt buuut somehow while in route we managed to clean off with makeup wipes, change into out dinner clothes, touch up our hair and makeup, and then walked into the restaurant exactly on time for our reservation. We looked fly and no one was none the wiser. It was pretty awesome.
