Theda again
December 1st, 2006
It’s too cold out today to post an outdoor nude, so here’s another shot of Theda in a hotel room. This shot was posted on D. Brian Nelson’s Hotel Room Nudes blog in October when I was a guest photographer there. Again, like the last post of Theda, this shot is about color and light and about using the environment of a hotel room to make an image. Here’s what I wrote about it then:
In May I made a trip to New York City to do a studio shoot with Theda and another favorite model, Kat. When I contacted Theda about the shoot she said she would like to also shoot in a somewhat famous, but cheap for Manhattan, hotel. So I got a room…5th floor walkup and she came over to the hotel after the studio shoot. I work in color and this room really worked for that. I love the colors in this shot with Theda’s body becoming the only somewhat non-color element in the composition. I had just gotten a new lens before this trip, at 12-24mm zoom. It let me do wide angle work with my digital Nikon again, and made this shot possible. Light is from the single window. Shot at 12mm, f/4.5 1/80, ISO 800. Exposure done in program mode with a -1.3 compensation. The program exposure mode on most modern cameras is much better at getting the right exposure than even the most meticulous photographer with a hand-held meter. You just have to know when the program mode is going to be wrong. That’s easy with a digital camera. Just look at the histogram and see exactly where each tone in the photo is, using math, not guesswork. Using those tools it is very easy, and very precise, to set exactly the exposure you want to get the look you are after in an image. It helps to know a bit about the zone system and to have some ability to pre-visualize what you want the final image to look like. Here all I really had to do was be careful to hold detail in the highlights and then pull up the shadows in photoshop later.
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