When I arrived at the studio today at 7:45am, Yanick was in a cheerful mood. He told me that the only bad news for this week were that one of his towels got so dirty that he could not get it clean. Frankly, I can live with that.

We had scheduled a shoot for today last week already, namely a shoot for Simon Tooley and his husband Yves for page 271. All seemed to go well, since preproduction really ran smooth this time, no problems at all. We had the location down, the limousine we needed was reserved, and everyone arrived on time. We started shooting some personal portraits for them in the studio (as you know, people that choose to be in the book also get free personal images if they like). So at about 9am, I called the limoservice to double.. triplecheck - we had already confirmed with them on the phone the day before - and basically help them out, in case they had problems finding their way to the studio. It turns out, they completely messed everything up and the guy tells us that he has neither a limo, nor a driver now. Great. But there is always things you have to adjust to, and things like those happen, so we ended up organizing another car from another service on short notice, which - thank God - worked out fine. The car arrived at around ten which was perfect, since we were just done shooting the personal portraits and started setting up outside for the book shoot.

When everything was set, Fang Fang touched up the make-up once more and we were able to get going. Yanick shot them for about an hour and although Montreal is a little bit on the cold side these days, both of them were holding up great. It was obvious that they enjoyed their experience today and we can do nothing but share that feeling.

So the actual shot for the book did not take us too long to get. Both looked fabulous in the picture and the lighting was working out very well, so Yanick only shot for about an hour total. The whole thing was over at 11am and we started our daily routine again; lots of work here at the studio, and lots of great pictures to choose from. Most importantly though, another page to be checked off on the way to achieve our ultimate goal of raising 41 million Euros: Page 271 ( 1000€ / 1490US$ / 1530CN$ ), in favor of the Farha Foundation, fighting HIV&Aids.

Page 271: Simon and Yves