I photographed San Diego musician Mimi Zulu the other night at her home in San Diego. Mimi and I have worked on a few music videos together in the past and she’s wonderful to work with because she is open to all ideas and has great style.

My approach with this shoot was to photograph Mimi with a simple setup of two lights with one umbrella. I haven’t done much work like this lately, so it was nice working with Mimi to get it out of my system and fine tune my ideas. I had been shooting a lot of film for the past few months and enjoy the delayed satisfaction of seeing the print of the images made, however I began to crave the instant satisfaction of digital photography again.

The shoot took around two hours, and I feel with every shoot like this that I do I realize the importance of planning. I typically have a few ideas in my head, but writing them down and having sample images to show the subject before making the photos always helps.