SaltedJam and 5h1take – Jirai-kei photoshoot

I was really excited for this shoot! Jirai-kei as an aesthetic is (to my mind) very girly and fussy, but with an edge to it, and that makes it interesting. 🔪 It’s like a gap moe of sorts… but I just really like frills.

We had a rough plan laid out for the shoot, a few locations to try, then we let it just run at its own pace from there. I’d call it a success, because we didn’t wrap up until about five hours later 😂

Logistics-wise this was pretty messy, a lot of driving around and hassles with being in the right place at the right time. I wanted to use a borrowed Merc to shoot with (thanks Goget) but it’s very difficult to light the scene when you don’t have a space to work in. Given that we were literally on the street it wasn’t really possible to plan that ahead of time, and you can’t really thrash that out by firing strobes outside someone’s house at 11:30pm…

You can see it in a few photos at the end but we’re clearly not name-dropping anything there; more planning and more time needed to do a good job in and around a car. I’m happy with the result, but was hoping for a lot more.

The other lesson learnt: using a lighter is really really hard when your hands are cold and numb. It’s probably the coldest time of the year, and we spent waaay too long trying to get a flame into 5h1take’s hand so she could light the cigarette. Honestly we should’ve done that inside the car, rather than sitting on the bonnet.