Fuzzypictures's Weblog

but i am dancing as fast as i can, trying to keep up with this lightspeed life of mine as the sun has sent an unusually fast corona mass ejection of a large cloud of charged plasma toward earth creating beautiful auroras over parts of the planet. see nasa link

but i am looking through a photoshoot that mary wehrhahn did on fri with a traveling nude figure study model keira grant who’s pictures are posted below.  any photoshoot is an opportunity to learn something about the craft which mary and i did. mary is looking for emotion emitting people for her series inner sanctum and all that glitters.

i am trying to add to or just finish my cave dwelling adam and eve series which really hasn’t been posted on my web site which is under construction. well i thought keira would make a lovely addition. but as you’ll see here, lovely pictures but something doesn’t work which i’ll try and point out. not that keria did anything wrong, she didn’t but it her training and my total lack of  seeing that’s the problem.

part of doing these shoots is to learn how to direct the models or participants in order to get what i am looking for, sometimes the magic works sometimes it doesn’t. so you can be the final arbitrator and i’ll just add my commentary and see what develops.

here are the first ones letting mary work with her gold cloth, i lit the space with tungsten softboxes for her and flash for me. i was trying out my tota umbrella on my white lightning 1200’s. key light here 1200 with 216 on reflector and tota umbrella softbox back.

keria with gold cloth

notice the placement of her hands and how she uses her feet, more on that later but it seems this is a fine art model style, me not being a fine art model i wasn’t aware of this nuance.

keria nude

now after this image i should have just sat down and rested.

after the shoot i asked mary if she got anything and she said not too much but some over and under exposed ones she liked. some days are like that. during this section was mostly me backing away from my take charge personality and letting mary direct the model. but i did fool around while waiting my turn.

keria semi nude

here i took off reflector and added some blackwrap to a front 1200 because i don’t have any barndoors nor did i want to fool around with setting flags. working in movies i’ve learned to work fast never wanting to be the person or department to hold up production. very big no no. below is a more traditional light cropping.

female semi nude

but again notice her hands and feet. the thumbs extended away from the hand forming a V and her feet curled away from her body pointing down or away in this case. this isn’t a problem really more about style or form.

but in this next series it’s not something that i am looking for. maybe i am just picky and seeing something that others don’t notice. here i switched over to tungsten with strip box overhead gelled and 750 zip light fill.

keria's nude back

here again are the hands, notice the V. while the feet are again pointing away from the body. she does have a lovely back and cute tush which adds to the overall form and line of the figure.

another image this time sitting.

keria sitting

i remember a discussion keria and i had about the style i wanted from her as she showed me her pointed feet saying how this was fine art modeling to which i replied ‘i wanted a more natural look’. we did discuss what this series was about and who i thought she was as a character. during some of the poses i told her exactly what i was looking for, emotion, which was hard for her to do. models aren’t actors as their training is so different, so asking someone to do something they are not use to nor trained for is difficult.

it’s not about a pretty body but the emotional impact the image has, either through the tension in the body’s hands or face. i like to tell a story with my images beginning in the viewers mind, i want them to think. if the work does that then i’ve got them.

keria kneeling

this is one of the first shots in this series and really works. so any complaints i have about her really come right back to me. she was an all around trooper and really tried to give me a successful session. did i get something i can use and did she give me what i asked for?  who knows

life is just stuff and then more stuff. the problem is to be able to live with just the stuff that’s here now and forget about the stuff from yesterday.

so if you’ve gotten this far maybe you’ve gained an insight to my work, if you have, fine. at least no animals were hurt in the creation of this post.

jene youtt