Lake Cumberland
January 9th, 2007
Another man-made lake, but very different from the old lake where the lily photo was taken. Lake Cumber-
land is much newer, much larger and much wilder. There was no issue there with getting away from other people and having privacy to do our figure work. We cruised around the lake in a pontoon boat looking for good locations for two days. One of the great things about Lake Cumberland is the great variety of rock and vegetation which provided opportunities for many different natural backgrounds. Mindy did a fantastic job of getting herself into whatever spot was required for a photo. Here she had to do quite a bit of climbing over sharp rocks to get to this ledge…but she knew it would be worth it.
I have a 2007 calendar of Lake Cumberland photos available here: http://www.lulu.com/Wayward
I’ll keep the calendars available for a little more time, but if you want one you should order it soon…they will be gone before long.
Lilies
January 8th, 2007
Since it’s turned cold now finally and feels like winter I thought a nice summer water image would be good. This is shot in an old man-made lake in Ohio. Those lilies are really that big. No photoshop magic involved. The water there was very shallow…about 6 inches deep. We had boat trouble because the motor sucked up mud. But lilies like muck…and when I got out of the boat to check it out before asking the model to try it, the muck came up to mid-thigh. My Teva’s are still down there. At one point I thought I was going down too. Every time I tried to lift one foot the other foot would sink deeper. But I managed to get back into the boat without dunking my D100. The model did better and found some pipes running through the muck that let her pose up high where she needed to be to make this photo work.
This is an example of how it is possible to work outdoors, even in somewhat exposed locations. This lake has houses all around it. But in the middle of the week in the middle of the day, most people are not at home. And if someone did see us, there is a natural tendency to see what you expect to see. So, from a distance this was just a woman in a tiny bikini. At any rate, no one bothered us and we were out on the lake for a long time with the model seldom having anything on. Works for me.
Dirty Show
January 7th, 2007
This photo of Gaea in body paint will be in the next “Dirty Show” in Detroit next month. I have to admit that I debated for quite a while about whether or not to enter the Dirty Show. It really isn’t oriented toward what I’m doing with my work, but their approach and mine do seem to have a small overlap, and it’s nearby and I know a lot of people who do participate, so in the end I decided to go ahead and see how they reacted to my work. As usual, they didn’t pick the ones I thought they would, but I like this photo so I’m happy it will be shown. Now I just have to get it matted and framed and shipped up to them by the deadline.
This shot was done after Geaa and I had done a body painting shoot. Someone had told me to try mixing powdered water-soluble paint in baby oil to get a nice surface effect. It worked for the effect, but was very unmanageable because the paint never dried and made a huge mess. After shooting for a while we stopped and Gaea started wiping the paint off. I saw what it looked like and told her to stop and get back in front of the background. This is the result. It pays to keep paying attention…you never know when the best photo is going to turn up.
Lani
January 4th, 2007
This is my current favorite photo. That’s why it is the cover photo on my book, “The Figure In Nature,” which is available here: [link]
I had this photo in my head for a couple years and kept trying to shoot it while doing other figure shoots. Finally I decided to just do what needed to be done to get it captured. When I get something like this in my head I have to get it recorded or it just won’t go away. So I called up one of my favorite models, Lani in the mountains of North Carolina. I knew she could do what it took to get the shot and that she would know a good stream to use. I described the photo to her and told her to find the right stream and tell me the day and I’d drive down from Ohio. The day came, we hiked around and found just the right spot. Lani got in the freezing mountain stream and looked beautiful and serene.
A basic part of the concept I had in my head was to blend the model with the water by using a slow shutter speed. I knew Lani had the perfect hair to blend with the blurred water and create the effect I was after. With the camera on a tripod out in the stream the shutter speed had to be just slow enough to blur the water without causing Lani to also blur. And, of course, the long shutter speed still had to allow for proper exposure of the photo. Shooting with digital was a huge advantage here, since it allowed me to check that I was getting exactly what I wanted. There are spots of sunlight creating the color effects in this shot, so I had to be careful not to overexpose or those colors, which are critical elements of the composition, could easily have blocked up to white and ruined the photo. I use auto exposure for most of my work, checking the histogram and adjusting with exposure compensation to get just the right exposure. In this case I determined that 1/20 second would give me the blur I was after while still allowing for correct exposure. I used shutter preference to hold that shutter speed and dialed in 1/3 stop under exposure to hold the highlight detail. If I were shooting this today I’d be able to leave the tripod at home and shoot it with image stabilization in the 18-200 lens…image stabilization compensates for camera movement, but not for subject movement, so it should have worked perfectly on this shot.
Besides being a near perfect capture of the pre-visualized image, I like this shot because it embodies much of what I try to do with the figure in nature…showing the links between the forms and including symbolism. I hope you enjoy.
I decided to post this today because it is currently getting a lot of attention on DeviantArt.com. I have to confess I don’t quite understand that site. I joined it a while back because a model I had photographed was posting photos there from our shoot and I wanted to check them out. Since then I’ve posted some of my work and found that the proportion of idiots there seems to be significantly lower than on most places like it on the internet. I’ve met some great people there, including some models I have worked with or plan to work with, and the people there seem to like my work.
Well, today they selected this photo as a “daily deviation” which means it has been highlighted on the site. During the day thousands of people have looked at this photo and many have made nice comments. If you haven’t seen DeviantArt.com, go check it out. You might like it, and if you figure out what it is all about come back and clue me in. Here’s the link to my page on DA: http://davel51.deviantart.com/
Ribs
January 3rd, 2007
I’ve only had time to glance at the photos of Nola, but that’s enough to tell me there are a lot of photos there that I’m very happy with. But, with that many keepers I want to take some time and do a thorough edit on the desktop with the big monitor instead of my 12 inch laptop screen, so I’m posting another oldie today. Much more Nola to come soon.
We are half way home and I’m on high-speed wireless, a welcome relief from the 28K dial-up connection I was using in Vermont.
This shot is another old studio photo shot on film many years ago. No, the model isn’t anorexic. She’s not even particularly skinny. Just a nice healthy attractive figure. She just stretched and sucked in her breath for this. I was interested in the pattern of the ribs and the form of her figure when posed in this fashion. I find it a bit disturbing, and that’s exactly what I was going for, so I call it a success. Sorry about the quality of these old scans. They were done from prints a long time ago. One of these days I’ll get around to rescanning them.
Nola
January 2nd, 2007
Vermont has many beautiful sights. Today I had the pleasure to photograph one of the most beautiful, Nola. Nola just moved back to Vermont from Montreal. We had talked about working together in Montreal, but I hadn’t worked out a trip up there before she moved. When I saw that she was now in Vermont I couldn’t resist seeing if we could work together while I was visiting here. I’m so very pleased that we did. This is just a very quick pick from today’s shoot. There are many, many more photos that look great and I’ll probably share more of them with you in the near future.
Nola is not only beautiful, but also a very nice person, a lot of fun to be around. I hope to shoot with her again many times. Her body is perfect for figure work. And it is always so much more pleasant to work with nice people…and Nola is one of the nicest I’ve ever met. A real treasure. You can find Nola on Model Mayhem here:
http://modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=81819
Tomorrow we start the drive back home from Vermont, so a post tomorrow will depend on whether I have internet access wherever we end up stopping for the night.
Vermont Sunset
January 1st, 2007
It’s a new year. I hope it is a good one for all of us.
I’m visiting family in Vermont. This is the view at sunset (shot a couple years ago on another visit) from where I’m staying. Of course, being a sunset, it is looking west from Vermont. Those are the Adirondack Mountains. Lake Champlain is hidden, but between Vermont and the mountains. Sometimes from here you can catch a glint of sunlight off the lake if you look carefully.
Tomorrow I’ll take a break from family and do a shoot with a beautiful Vermont model. If all goes well you should soon be seeing some photos from that shoot.
Am I the only one who sees a similarity between this photo and the last one I posted?
More Old Stuff
December 31st, 2006
I could say this one is for my good friend Dave Rudin who asked for more old film photos, but I had actually planned to post it today before he commented on yesterday’s photo. It’s from around the same time as the last photo. Again, the copyright notice refers to when I first posted it on the internet.
Sometimes when I used to show this photo I wouldn’t mention that it was a nude and often the viewer thought it was a landscape with a sunrise. Of course, I’ve always felt there is a connection between the figure and the landscape.
Happy New Year!
Classic
December 30th, 2006
I’ve been spending some time looking through some of my older work. This one is from many years ago when I started doing figure work again after a break of some years. It’s a simple photo, single light source in my studio. At this time I was just simply exploring light and the figure to find pleasing shapes and forms. Some might call this classic figure photography. I think it’s a necessary step for any photographer who is interested in figure work. My work has moved in another direction over the past 10 years or so, but there’s nothing wrong with some of these older photos. Looking at them has me thinking about doing some new work along these lines and seeing how my view of the figure in this style has changed over those years. And it will give me something to work on while I wait for the weather to warm up so I can shoot more photos of naked women on rocks, because as we all know, the world just doesn’t have enough photos of naked women on rocks.
Once again this photo is so old it was shot on film. 35mm color negative, Kodak Royal Gold…or whatever it was called back then…Ektasomething, I think. And it was shot long before the copyright date on it…that was when I first scanned it and placed it on a web site.
Yin Yang
December 29th, 2006
Here’s a real old one. Some of you may be able to identify the model by her tattoo. It’s Nancy Freshour from quite a few years ago. In fact, this is so old it was shot on film. Imagine that! I lit it with a single strobe fired through a cookie that I had made to create this effect. I was working on abstracting the figure.
Maybe this is a good time for me to talk about tattoos on models. I know some photographers really have issues with tattoos. Some won’t photograph models with tattoos. Myself, I just don’t care. I really don’t think it’s any of my business. And part of the joy of doing this kind of work, at least for me, is finding what each model brings to the shoot and using all those unique things about this particular person to make a photo. If the model has tattoos I may work them into a composition, as I did in this case. Or I may do a photo where the tattoos are not obvious, if that seems to be what works. Or I may just shoot and not worry about the tattoos. I have been known to remove a tattoo if I felt it detracted from the final composition, but that is rare. I respect the decision a model has made to put ink on her body…the tattoo has become a part of her body and in most cases should be there in the photo. It’s part of who she is and what she looks like.
The most common argument against tattoos in “fine art figure” photography (what the hell is “fine art” anyway? How about some coarse art? How is fine art different from art?) is that the photos aren’t timeless because of the tattoos. Well, why should our photos be timeless? One of the most valuable things that photography does is record our times. I don’t mind if my photographs are considered to be anchored in our current times (though I suspect some would say my photos are anchored in the last century, or even the century before that…but that’s another discussion). At any rate, the “timelessness” issue isn’t one that I’m concerned about. My photographs represent my personal reaction to my life and times. I’m an old fart from the 60s, so that’s in there. Of course, I work with younger women in many cases (though many of my favorite models are closer to my age than to their teen years) and I try to make our shoots collaborative, so their ideas are also part of the final image. Timeless? I’m reminded of the question, “Do you know the difference between ignorance and apathy?” The answer, of course, is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I’m traveling and I’m on a dial-up connection…a slow dial-up connection, it takes forever just to load this blog…but I’ll try to keep posting over the next few days.
