365/101 Bring out your dead!

"I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."

Gladiator

On day 101, I shot for the third time in the new studio. It is becoming familiar again. Slowly, I'm learning how to best use everything that the place has to offer me. Including the automatically locking door. A curious statement if you will. You see, all along I knew it would lock on it's own and, therefore, require that I always carry the key. I was the KeyMaster, the door was the GateKeeper and Zuul ... Zuul was now locked somewhere inside the studio. With my key.

Good way to start a new relationship with a model and makeup artist, eh?

"Uh, yeah. So, nice to meet you. We'll begin shooting in a bit, as soon as one of my studio partners comes and unlocks the door! Ha ha ... so, how about that weather?"

In all seriousness, it wasn't that bad. They were very gracious about it and we only had to stand outside for about 15 minutes. We chatted a bit about the project and some of the other work they were doing. The model is a local burlesque dancer and her friend a costumer and MUA. Seemed like the perfect combination for the evening.

The idea behind the shoot was Día de los Muertos. Day of the dead. I'd been wanting to shoot something like this for awhile and when she brought the idea up, I jumped at the chance. I've always liked the idea of the painted skulls.

I had an idea of how I wanted to light this. The face would be the focal point of most of the photos. I wanted the light to be up high and moderately directional, falling off slightly as it got farther and farther from the makeup. Went with a 22" beauty dish for the main light, boomed up above her head. Had a sock over it, so it acted more like a softbox at that point, but still had that nice beauty dish light quality to it.

A second light was set on the far side of her, opposite the key; it had a gridded stripbox on it, helping to provide a nice bit of separation from the rest of the scene. Carving her out of it, almost. In later photos, we took a third light, gelled with a nice red, and splashed that up against the black muslin background, providing a bit more separation of her hair from the blackness. It was a good choice and helped to create one of the best photos of the entire set (shown below).



I think, if I had to do this one over, the only thing I would change is the use of the black muslin background. I think a charcoal gray or black seamless would have worked much better here; the wrinkles in the muslin are somewhat distracting and divergent. Just a bit too much chaos. But then, I'm probably being picky. Yeah. Probably.

We had a few other ideas we wanted to try out, but didn't have much time to fully develop them because of how late we started. She's very into corsets and had brought one along, but we'd only gotten a dozen photos out of it before we realized what time it was (and it takes a fair amount of time to get a corset on and cinched up properly, let me tell you). We were going to shoot a few pinup-styled poses with a chromed stool. Next time, though. Definitely next time.



The model is Haazard. She's on Model Mayhem. Definitely fun to work with and definitely plan to work with her again. The makeup was courtesy of her friend Morgan.

And finally, I leave you with one last photo from the set.

365/31 Body Paint

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?"

Pablo Picasso

Another day, another interesting and new photo concept for me. Spent the afternoon with the guys from Curvy Canvas to do some promotional photos for their body painting work to seed the upcoming Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations here in Austin.

We'd been shooting email back and forth every few weeks since last September. "Hey, you know, we should shoot!" "Yeah, that's a great idea!" You know, the basic song and dance trying to get things worked out to where we both had a free afternoon to get it done. Well, that was Sunday.

Now, having said that, I have to mention that we've had another cold snap in Austin. It was in the 30's today so we ended up shooting inside the entire time. I wish it had been a bit warmer. More like the 60's. The house we were shooting at had this wonderful gazebo and hammock out in the back yard that would have worked in a most complimentary way with the first model (above) and the celtic design that was airbrushed onto her.

Sadly, it couldn't work out the way I wanted. Blue, frozen models don't work so well when you're trying to photograph them. Unless, you know, you're going for that morbid corpse look. But I digress.

After finishing up with the two models, we began packing up and someone mentioned doing a quick shot of the first laying out across the bamboo floor. An excellent idea! So, we had her lay out and a quick arrangement of the softbox and her hair and ... voilà! Instant hotness. Pushed the softbox around after a few more clicks until I got the shadow arrangement that I wanted.

This was one of my favorites from the shoot. And, if you ever need any bodypainting, you should definitely check out the Curvy Canvas folks. Excellent attitudes and artistry.

The Red Cloth

"So, yeah, the photo that James came up with for the contest was really good. The barbed wire was a great touch. It definitely made it WAY more deviant than Chris' photo."

We sat at Opal Divine's that morning discussing the bet between Chris and James. The aftermath was kind of hilarious. James with a resounding 11-to-1 win over Chris. Especially with all the smack Chris was throwing around.

"But, honestly, I think the photo I did of Morgan wearing the gas mask was definitely more deviant than James'."

She walked into the game room where we were sitting. "oh! Gas masks?"

My ears perked a moment and I turned around. She was cute. Spritely.

"Yeah. I recently took a photo of a friend wearing this gas mask she picked up."

"Photos? Are y'all photographers?"

I looked around at the other six guys at the table. "Yeah. We meet up here frequently to talk about photography and stuff."

"Cool! I love having my picture taken. I could model for y'all sometime!"

Everyone laughed. Sure, why not? I looked back at her and said half-jokingly, "Sure, give me your contact info and we'll set something up."

Funny. Some of the guys assumed that was meant for everyone. She laughed, took some of our drink orders and wandered off. We went back to discussing the photos and other random Strobist stuff.

About fifteen minutes later she came back in and walks up to me, a slip of paper in hand. "Here you go!"

It was her contact info. Heh. I turned to look at the guys and saw jaws drop. Yeah. Definitely funny. As I started to slip the paper in my pocket, one exclaimed, "But that's for all of us!"

"Yeah, sure." I laughed, "and you're more than welcome to ask her for the same ..."

A few weeks later, we had the shoot set up.

One thing I've learned in the last year is that if you don't have the balls to ask someone for something you'll never know if they'll do it. When an opportunity presents itself you'll do one of two things: take it or sit there kicking yourself for not opening your mouth. Be bold, live notoriously, whatever moniker you want to attach to this idea ... all it takes is opening your mouth and asking the question that hangs at the tip of your tongue.

This is Donica. She's a sweet girl. We had a lot of fun in the studio. This was one of the shots I was explicitly looking for that night. It's variation of something I picked out of a magazine last year, the main focus being a red cloth sweeping down across the back and just barely hiding a nude woman. We're definitely going to shoot again, though, next time I think she'll be in a mohawk. She's wild like that. Gotta love a woman who'll let you fuck up her hair for art.

Lighting the Nude

One of the styles of photography that I eventually want to get into is artistic nudes. No, not that skanky Hustler look or that overly lit Playboy style. Something moody, with depth and creativity. This is sort of a lead up into my big goal of doing edgy and risqué stuff ... fetish photography and the like.

I've been taking baby steps leading up to this. Mostly it's been learning to light and better understand the light. Then it was beginning to deal with models and getting comfortable with them AND working with the equipment at the same time. I'm still getting used to that. It's somewhat disconcerting: like juggling flaming pitch, a porcupine, and a running sawzall. Your hands are going everywhere, you're moving this way and that, you're jumping forward to adjust something, you're falling back to do something else. Lots of things to pay attention to.

Well, the next step in this for me is to learn more about the lighting nudes (in general). So, with that idea in mind, I was browsing the bookstore and came across two books on nude photography. The first one didn't impress me much. I don't even remember the name at this point. But, the second one, Lighting the Nude, caught my eye. It's filled with resulting pictures, the lighting diagrams behind the images, and a description of how the shot was taken. This stuff is right up my alley. I can pick apart many photos now, so it's interesting to see how some of these photos are built up.

The book is 448 pages, and is a collection of about 200 different images from various top photographers. Each chapter covers a different aspect of this style of photography, from props and posing to romantic and fetish. Each photo contains a breakdown of the lighting, positions of modifiers in reference to the model, the camera exposure and film type, as well as a short but concise write up by the photographer. Another thing it has going for it is that every photo I've seen in the book is done in a very tasteful way and I've gotten quite a few ideas for photographs I'd like to create.

Overall, very well done and recommended (if you can find a copy).