The other day a Model Mayhem male model contacted me about shooting some Time For Pictures shoot. His only request is that his face not be recognizable. They don’t call me Fuzzypictures for nothing, sure I am up for it.
For those who don’t know what Shibari is It’s an ancient Japanese art form developed during the Samari time for bonding their prisoners with rope. It is also referred to as the art of Kinbaku a sensual provocative form of Japanese erotic bondage now becoming popular in America.
That day and still today my flash receivers were acting wooky. Sometimes they worked sometimes not, so exposure was all over the place and I had a lot of over exposed throw aways along with some surprises.
I’ve wanted to add some spooky Images to Peau magazine for the autumn issue sort of as a theme and thought the tattoo’s might do the trick. Who knows what works and what doesn’t?

Dark Zen

Dark Zen
I haven’t gotten around to trying to adjust the over exposed images yet and maybe I won’t it’s a lot of work finding interesting people and shooting them then selecting images we both like.

Dark Zen
We chatted about our likes and dislikes but I never asked him the story of why so many tattoo’s. We did exchange information about who some of the tattoo artists were both his and mine where done as I shot.

Darkk Zen
If I don’t know and like the person ‘I am out of there.’ I am way too old to be uncomfortable anymore, been there done that. My work is about collaboration with the model around a theme, if there is one, I couldn’t do this type of photography without the model having ‘some chops’ as they say in jazz.

Dark Zen
I need to fix those strobes but this White Lightning 1200 Ultra keeps on kicking, I’ve only two left out of four but what a light.I didn’t need to give him much if any direction as he does this out of love also. I did show him images as we went along so he had an idea of what I was shooting.

Bamboo pole
We fooled around with this pole for awhile but it didn’t do anything for me not that we didn’t get some interesting shots of his hands holding the pole but I wanted some more so ‘Hey lets try this’ my favorite saying.

Prisoner of the dark

Detail
I am reading a book called The Beauty of Kinbaku a history of the art and artists which got me thinking about what’s Japanese and one of the first think that comes to mind is Bamboo, so I go down to the flower district and find some. Who knew there was a vicious spider living in them and bit me on the elbow while I napped. Yeow some poison I sprayed the whole lot. I don’t like to kill spiders but he attacked me first.

Dark Zen
Well I’ve saved the best for last, although they were the first images we shot we both loved all of these but the first images blew me away. I looked at them and said ‘that’s it.’ I am not sure I could have planed them any better.

Dark Zen naked
But wait there is more, our first picture below.

What am I holding?
Yep that Ultra 1200 is something. This is from one of our first images sets. See I couldn’t do this without someone aware of the creative process.
Jene












