Natasha mostly posed herself and no, she’s not a real model :) It kind of went like this - I’d ask her to strike a pose and see if I like it. If it didn’t look good or if small adjustments needed to be done, I’d ask her to change or correct the little things (like placing hands or something like that). So, mostly it was trial and error. But she did a terrific job coming up with new poses and didn’t mind to rotate though some that we already tried but when wearing different outfits.

I did use flash a lot. The reason smumug is not showing it is because I mostly used it off camera. Especially by the water, the flash was on a light stand 6-8 feet away from Natasha, on my right hand side at 45 degrees angle firing directly straight at her. I was probably 20-30 fit away with a 70-200 zoom, triggering main flash with my on-camera built in flash which was set to commander mode and was not contributing to overall exposure. I’m guessing that’s why smugmug is not showing those images as “flash”.

Photosession lasted probably 2 may be 2.5 hours. We started when the sun was still quite high (so we were mostly looking for all sorts of creative shadows) and we finished when the sun was almost gone.

I never tried using reflector. I think it’s a great idea but would require an assistant which I don’t have :-) Flash makes it a bit easier - I toss it up on to a light stand and I can control its power output from my camera, never needing to touch it. With the reflector I’d be running back and forth, constantly adjusting it and repointing it. But if I had an assistant I’d definitely experiment with it.