Corset
December 8th, 2006
CareLyn Anita wearing her corset. Shot last night in my Chicago hotel room. CareLyn is a great model, a fun person to be around, and very good looking. She’s also only 4’11” tall, not the standard model height, but that’s never been an issue with me. In fact, I really like short models. And, you wouldn’t have known she was that short from this photo if I hadn’t told you…
When I left for Chicago I had shoots scheduled with 5 models. So far I’ve done one shoot and two models have cancelled. That’s pretty much standard when working with “internet models” so it’s not unexpected. At least these two had the courtesy and professionalism to let me know they were not going to be able to do the shoots we had planned. Still, two more shoots scheduled while I’m here.
I’m pretty disappointed in my hotel room as a shooting location. It’s a nice room, but lacks style. My Sunday shoot is the only one I’ll be doing during the day in the room and I’m hoping using daylight will help me make the room look more interesting. We’ll see. Tomorrow’s shoot is at a studio/home location, so that should offer more possibilities.
I spent today at Calumet Photo learning about some new printers and software. I learned that the NIK software is pretty much just a way to replicate cheesy filters and effects that we used to do in camera. Not much application for it in creative work. But the new Nikon Capture NX software looks useful. And I’m pretty impressed with the new Epson 3800 printer. Both color and black and white prints look great. In fact, I’d have to say that it goes beyond what is possible with conventional darkroom materials, color and black and white. Now I have to see if I can justify buying one. How many 16×20 prints would I have to make to make it pay for itself? Hmmm…
Another Pinhole
December 7th, 2006
I’m on the road to Chicago today and don’t know if I’ll have time to post after I get there. So you have to look at another of my digital pinhole photos to tide you over until I can post something from the trip or a more conventional nude from the files.
This is Nemesis again. She’s damn handy to have around.
Another crappy photo
December 6th, 2006
Well, I guess I’m just in a crappy camera kind of mood. This was shot with a good camera, my old Nikon D100. But it was shot with a home made pinhole in place of the lens. I like mixing old and new technologies and seeing what happens. It really doesn’t matter what method is used to record the image. And digital makes it a good bit easier in this case too. The instant review allows me to adjust exposure and composition. Since it’s impossible to see anything through the viewfinder that helps. And I don’t have to wait to process film to find out what effective aperture the pinhole happens to be. By increasing the ISO I’m actually able to hand hold the camera. And I can take as many images as I want, not limited by the single sheets of some pinhole cameras.
The model is the wonderful Nemesis who always seems to be willing to humor me when I have some weird new setup I want to try out. Light is window light in my studio.
I’m off to Chicago in the morning for a few days of shooting and a visit to the Calumet “Digital Days.” I should have internet access in my hotel, so I hope I’ll be able to post…maybe some of the new things I’ll be shooting there.
Mini Digital
December 5th, 2006
Just for fun. And why do we do this if not for fun? I shot this photo of Amanda tonight with a brand new digital camera I just bought yesterday. It cost $10 at the Walgreens up the street. It’s a real digital camera. Hooks up to the computer with USB. You can use it over and over as long as you keep downloading and deleting the files from the camera. Has enough internal memory for 20 “high” resolution shots. Yes, it’s crappy quality and the files are tiny (high resolution is pretty low). But WOW! Ten dollars! And it takes photos. This has shot in fairly dim light inside. I’m going to have to shoot something outdoors or by a window in daylight to see if the softness is camera movement or just the lens. It’s an f/2.8 lens…amazing.
Just for fun. But really, I can remember (showing my advanced age) when a digital camera of this resolution cost $20,000.
Could this be the true digital Holga?
Color again
December 4th, 2006
OK, back to something serious. Well, not to say that photography is anything to be taken seriously, but some photos are more serious than others, I suppose. This is one of those photos that I think all photographers have: One that no one but the photographer seems to “get.” I love this photo. But I don’t think anyone who I’ve ever shown it to has seen what I see in it without prompting. I’m willing to say that is most likely a failing of the photographer and the photo. But I still see it. Let me give you a hint.
Much of my work has to do with the interaction of the female figure with its surrounding environment.
OK…another hint: I’m very interested in color.
Still don’t see it? That’s ok, no one does…sigh. So I guess the photo is a failure.
What I see here, and no one else notices, is the effect the nude body has on the color of the surrounding background. If you look to the right of the figure, to the right of the shadow, you will see the “true” color of the barn siding. On the left, where the sun is striking the figure and being reflected strongly you will see that the color of the siding has been changed, warmed up, by the reflected flesh color.
I find that interesting. I know it’s subtle. I know it happens all the time, but we seldom notice it, let alone pay any attention to it. Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. To me it is just one more small way to observe that we cannot be on this planet without changing it. Even just standing there in the sun we are changing the way the sun hits the planet and interacts with it. And the figure here is impacting the things that surround it in many ways. Color is just one, but to me it’s an interesting impact. Almost as interesting as the red rock glow in the desert canyons.
Christmas Eve
December 3rd, 2006
Well, this is something completely different. Pretty cheesy too, if I do say so myself. So just let me say up front, I meant that. This is the newest addition to my ongoing “Many Faces of Eve” project. If you’ve looked through my web site you may be familiar with some of the photos in that series. I’ve wanted to do “Christmas Eve” for a long time, but never was able to get just what I was after, but today, thanks to Amanda, I finally have it. The idea I’m trying to get to here is the temptation of the commercial Christmas as seen through the original temptress, Eve. But I hope that’s obvious.
Colors
December 2nd, 2006
Sometimes it isn’t about the light. Here the light is simply soft and unobtrusive. It’s the colors that I was working with in this composition. I saw the possibilities provided by the yellow flowers and green leaves. I asked the model to lie down in the stream and cover herself with the black mud in the stream bed. It was a hot day for once, so this wasn’t a huge sacrifice for her. I wanted the rich black as a background for the bright colors. I was also trying to change the way the model’s figure was seen, and to work on the theme of the unity of the figure with nature. You can probably draw some ideas about the woman as water symbol, earth mother, mother nature from this and many of my other photos. Those are the themes I work on all the time.
This photo was taken in a stream feeding into a small lake near my home in Ohio. While I often travel to different locations to do photos, I also work near my home and just where ever I happen to be when an opportunity for a photo comes my way. Most lakes have a lot of shallow swampy areas on the upstream end. There are usually beautiful backgrounds there.
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.
Theda
November 30th, 2006
Another way of looking at color. This is Theda in a nice upscale hotel room in New York City about three years ago. This was my first shoot, first meeting, with Theda and she really impressed me. She is a very talented model and is great to work with. I’ve since been back to NYC to work with her and hope to do more in the future. I keep trying to talk her into an outdoor shoot…who knows, maybe she’ll give in and go become one with nature for me one of these days. So far the closest I’ve come is the shot of her on a fire escape outside a Manhattan photo studio. I posted that shot on here last month.
The light for this shot is from the bedside lamp in the hotel room. I was using auto color balance on my D100 and Nikon always seems to go pretty warm in this kind of light. I’ve corrected the color in photoshop, but didn’t like the result. The color here seems to be more “correct” in how it feels…maybe even how it looked at the time. So that’s the way I’ve left it, because it feels right. I thought of this photo after yesterday’s post with the bright red light from the Wave at sunset. I decided quite a few years ago, after decades working in black and white, that I was really interested in color. So I’ve been shooting color for a long time now. And, as in these two and many other photos, what is happening with the color is very important to me, and to the photos.
Light and The Wave
November 29th, 2006
The Wave is a special place. In the red rock desert on the Utah-Arizona border, it’s hard to find if you don’t know exactly where you are going. It’s so popular that the Bureau of Land Management requires that specific reservations be made months before a visit. Visitors are limited to 12 each day. And yet, it’s become something of a cliché because so many photographers have been there and photographed it. I made my trip about 5 months after my trip to Maine. By this time I was fully committed to exploring the figure in nature. I was fortunate to find a fantastic model, perfectly suited to the difficulties of this shoot, not to mention beautiful and very physically able to take on any challenges that a shot might pose.
We hiked in before sunrise and stayed all day, hiking out at dusk. The dark contributed to our getting lost. Well, we weren’t really lost. As Daniel Boone said when someone asked him if he had ever been lost in the wilderness, “No, I’ve never been lost. I was bewildered once for three days.” Actually, we always knew where we needed to go. It was just that there is no real trail across the rock surface and we would head in a direction, come to a cliff or other obstacle and have to change course. But we found our way and spent the day shooting. It was a very productive shoot.
This is the last photo I took before we left at the end of the day. It’s my favorite. The reason is the light and the wind. The wind was a constant while we were there. And it is wind full of sand. I had to send one camera in for a cleaning by Nikon after it was exposed to that sand for the day. But it’s really the light that makes this shot so special. As the sun approaches the horizon it enters the narrow openings in the rock from the side and it reflects off the red rock. As the light bounces around in the rocks only red is reflected. So the light gets redder and redder every time it bounces. It almost seems to be on fire. That’s what’s going on here. This isn’t photoshop. (For the record, I very seldom do any manipulation with photoshop. I do the things that would be done in a conventional wet darkroom, but not much more. I don’t add backgrounds or place models into scenes…I don’t have anything against that kind of photography, but it isn’t what I do.) I’ve recently read some debate about the statement, “Photography is about light.” I have to acknowledge that the subject matter is important. But often it’s the interaction of the subject matter with the light that makes a successful photo. That’s what I see happening here. That’s often what I’m looking for in my work with the nude in nature.
