A few weeks ago, a friend from college contacted me through Facebook to see if I would be up for a session with her. She would wear a Cheesehead. With some cows.
My response was immediate: yes! Let’s make this happen!
So… backing up a bit. My friend from college is Jill Lover. She lives in LA, and was coming to Appleton to shoot a movie. She’s originally from Green Bay, and is actually a Packer fan. So… yeah. One foot in both worlds.
Speaking of feet, check this out:
Yeah, those are some niiice shoes. And yes, that is some bona fide cow poo. This shot is from early in the session – they were much worse by the end.
So… backing up a bit. Again. Jill and I decided to split the difference between Appleton and Madison to meet in Waupun. We’d meet up, go find some cows, and then see if we could take some pictures with them. Easy as pie, right?
Well, as it turns out, it was. I let Jill do the talking, for two reasons: she’s better at it than I am, and she’s much (much!) prettier than I am. It worked. Not only did we get permission at the first and only place we stopped, we got basically an all-access pass to these dairy cows. “You wanna go in there?” the farmer asked. Yes. Yes, we did.
Now, as I’ve covered in this blog before, I don’t much care about my clothes. I’ll lie down in the gravel to get the shot, NBD. Kneeling in manure? Sure, why not? But I wear crappy clothes. I would estimate that for 95% of the clothes I wear on a daily basis, my wife would be just as happy if, at the end of the day, I threw them in the trash instead of the hamper.
But for this concept, Jill was dressed. up. And that included the shoes. Which she—without a pause—walked right into the cow pasture in.
As it turned out, we didn’t even end up using any of the shots that showed the shoes. But that’s okay – the cows were just as happy to mess up her dress:
And once again, as this sequence proves, Jill was a great sport about it:
It was great to reconnect with an old friend (who is every bit the down-to-earth person I remembered her being) in the real world (Facebook is great, but no substitute for the real thing). We had a blast doing a very silly session, and got some fun shots. With cows.
