What you’ll see in this set is an amazing dedication of DROYC team to produce high quality work. What might seem like a summer day, is actually a late November morning in Barcelona. We are alone on a closed rooftop. It’s freezing. The temperature is below 10C and a cold air is blowing from the sea. We had no authorization to enter the roof, let alone shoot nudes on that rooftop. We used a loosely tight emergency handle to open the door.
Located on the 7th floor of our rental complex, the rooftop had two swimming-pools and an amazing view of Barcelona. But because it was November, it was technically closed – a sign saying that ice cold pools are not operational at this time of the year. Yet the emergency handle worked fine and we could get on the roof and shoot. The whole place seemed as if it were abandoned. And we had it all to ourselves.
Our apartment building was surrounded by a few high buildings. Some buildings were twice taller than our own and were standing between us and the sun. We had a narrow time window before the sun would disappear behind one of those buildings and the scenery would be lost. We had to work fast because we were not sure if we could even be on that rooftop let alone shooting nudes. Every minute mattered. We had to work in a rapid tempo but we also had to give Katya time to warm up between the shots, having her jacket ready.
For Katya it was a challenging shoot in such a weather – cold air, cold wooden surface, cold iron plates. Yet she managed to act her part as if it was summer. And Michael did an amazing job working quickly through finding the best places and positions to shoot Katya. Instead of focusing on one place and do a set out of it, Michael made the whole roof into a set – there are panorama shots of Barcelona, there are swimming pool pictures, there are blue sky shots.
A female security guard came 15-minutes after we’ve started to shoot and told us very politely to get out. She said she didn’t mind the nudity but that there were many family apartment units in the high buildings facing the rooftop and she didn’t want any complains about exposing kids to nudity. The fun part was that there was a security camera on the rooftop watching us all the time. Yet, it took them 15-minutes to came up and stop us – that must have given them enough time to enjoy the show.
Ideally we would have just needed another 15 minutes to shoot close-ups and portraits. After that we would have lost the sun anyway. But even with what we’ve got we had great difficulty selecting the best images for this set. The images, the scenery, the posing is breathtaking, and Barcelona’s skyline is as timeless as Katya’s beauty.
See full set of Katya Clover’s “Now I Want My Way”
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