Alena Wasserburgerova is from Brno in the Czech Republic. She was visiting southern California for a couple of months and staying in a house in Hollywood. She was here to work as a model with photographers in Los Angeles. Alena was about 21 years old at the time.
Alena has appeared on the cover of numerous magazines. I contacted her through her agent named Jerry Pasternak from Santa Monica who was also a former photographer for Penthouse and other magazines. Jerry was a great guy and talented old-school photographer who produced amazing work.
Cover Model Skin
I really liked working with Alena as a model because her skin was flawless. No re-touching was ever required with her. I often wonder where she is now? I have been to Brno a few times but never ran into her while I was there.
Photo courtesy of Pictor Photo Archive
Technical Details
The picture was shot on slide film in late November or early December in 1996 at a beach house in Laguna Beach, California, USA. It was in the late afternoon, probably around 4PM. The sun went down around 4:30pm. The background is a sliding glass door that faced the ocean and reflected the sunset.
I metered with my trusty Minolta AutoMeter IV light meter. I am just guessing that the exposure was about f/5.6 at 1/125 sec. I like shooting at the beach at that time because you don’t need any supplementary lights or anything. The sun is very low in the sky all afternoon.
The camera was a black Nikon FM2 SLR with a Nikkor 105mm Macro lens. I have both a chrome and black FM2 so it might have been the chrome one. Film was Fujichrome 100 Daylight balanced. I would buy it from the bin at Pro Photo Connection in Irvine for about $5.50 a roll. ISO=100, WB=Daylight, Aperture-priority (matrix metering), and single-point Auto-Focus. Exposure details: focal length=105mm, ISO=100, WB=daylight, f/5.6 @ 1/125.
The film was scanned onto PhotoCD by Pacific Color in Seattle Washington. Then converted to JPEG with Photoshop CS2 on a Macintosh G4 laptop. The file was batch converted, so no adjustments were made to exposure or color balancing. No retouching. I think there may have been some Unsharp Mask filter as part of the JPEG conversion, but I am going to call this As-Shot.
