Finding locations & Kiki in the € 20 Mill house (Patreon)

One of the more difficult things about location photography is finding suitable locations. 

When I go traveling, I'll generally try to ask anyone who has been to the area for insights, and one invaluable source is always to ask models.

One of the unusual things models experience is that photographers often bring models to fantastic places. And like the rest of the world, they usually have friends - many of which are also models or photographers.

Kiki had conferred with friends and knew an abandoned house (which turned out not to be all that abandoned after all). It allegedly required scaling a fence and avoiding a video camera to access the already broken window.

The only places available (I'm not breaking into anything) were the entrance (this) and the room behind my back (you'll see this in a later post).

Anyway, we shot a few sets and were out again 10 minutes later.

 We chatted about why a house like this was abandoned (the rest was cordoned off and locked under video surveillance).

She asked around and discovered the house was on sale for the neat sum of €20.000.000 - and yeah, it's massive, and I've only seen images of the rest. Had I known I would not have gone there.

Bus to reiterate, if you go somewhere and are shooting with a model, make sure to ask if they know any great location. Most do and will even have images of the sites. 

Half of the locations I shot at in Italy were places the models knew. 

Not utilizing such a source of knowledge would be insane.