When I was young and a student we had plenty of time to party and do all kind of other nice things. And it as was sort of normal – if not stimulated – to take your time resulting in an average seven to eight years study period to get your master’s degree instead of the nominal five years. Nowadays most students are under a lot of pressure to get high grades and they face many challenges. The heavy work load and high standards result in tremendous peaks and valleys, and we thought this was a nice theme for a “student shoot” for the Tetra Images collection.

A real student as my model

I was happy to find Thalassa, a real student – studying International Business at Maasticht University – as my model. I had planned to shoot at two locations:  the University Library and an outdoors location close to the University – if possible the University grounds. The Maastricht University Library appeared to be a good shooting location and nice summer weather was our friend when we shot in the park just in front of the University grounds.

Looking for expressions

In this shoot I was looking for many different expressions, the kind of expressions a student will have depending on the circumstances. So I was looking Thalassa to show achievement, aspiration, boredom, concentration, contemplation, challenge, learning, discovery, motivation, effort, determination, confidence, problems, frustrations and enjoyment, to mention a few. And Thalassa did just great. When my Creative Director saw the shots he immediately wanted me to do some more shoots with Thalassa Anyway, here are some shots. If you want to see all shots then this gallery will show them to you.

Thalassa on her blog about our shoots

For Thallasa it was the first time she was a model for a stock shoot. She did great !! But stock is most of the times about “every day life” and many stock shots miss the “glamour” of for instance fashion images. In this blog post Thalassa writes about this experience.