Professional sets have a lighting department. My weekends have Minh holding a silver car sunshade at an angle he insists is scientific, Chi watching the sun like it owes her money, and me trying to change tops in a cafe bathroom the size of a wardrobe. We call it practice. It is the best training I have ever had.
Golden hour in Saigon lasts about fifteen honest minutes. When you have four friends, two cameras and one evening, you learn things no casting workshop teaches: how to find your light without being told, how to give three different faces in one minute, how to keep your eyes soft when you are running out of frames. On a paid set, when the art director says we have five minutes of sun left, I am the calmest person there. I have been doing five minutes of sun my whole adult life.
There is also the fairy-light economy. Every cafe in this city strings warm bulbs across something, which means after sunset the shoot simply moves indoors and becomes a different shoot. Some of my favourite frames of the last year happened at a corner table after we had officially wrapped, over a lukewarm sinh to, when nobody was performing anymore.
If you are a new model reading this: find your people, buy the cheap camera, waste the film. The portfolio will follow. The friends, weirdly, are also the portfolio.