Ilary

The glamour shoot: Ilary

The whole set was built around the Ostia pier, with the sun sitting low behind the water. I shot mostly against the light, keeping Ilary lit with a Godox AD200 and using a variable ND together with a polarizer to cut the ambient light without resorting to HSS: that's where the still-colored sky and the clean separation of the figure from the background come from. The sun itself stays readable on the horizon in more than one frame, and the trail it opens across the water becomes a second subject, a strip of light running right up to the model's feet.

Three changes in forty-five minutes: red bikini in the water and leaning on the structure, light blue and green under the pier among the wooden poles and wet sand, a pale white dress in the spray with the beach huts behind. The poses alternate between leaning on the poles, knees in the water, back arched on the shoreline. Ilary moves through the space as if she had always known it: she finds the wood with her hands, uses it as a pivot and as support, lowers herself to where the wave reaches and rises again on the right beat, never losing contact with the lens. Under the pier the light turns softer and more diffused, filtered by the beams, and her body lifts away from the darkness of the spans; outside, on the shoreline, the foam climbs and closes the bottom of the frame.

A warm palette of orange and gold on the skin, with the cold blues of the sea in the lower framings, the ones shot almost at water level, where the wave in the foreground cuts across the frame and leaves the figure suspended beyond it. Towards the end the light pushes everything into coral and pink, and the tones grow even warmer. Ilary, as always, flawless: guaranteed result.