colors

Just a couple of days after the shoot with Beth, I was on an airplane to Chicago. Mostly it was a business trip, and a fairly full one; but it overlapped two weekends, and I'd scheduled a couple of shoots on the logic that it wasn't going to be getting any warmer in the Midwest for a while, and (hopefully) I wouldn't need to be back there for a few months. So it was last chance til spring to work through the backlog.

The first shoot was an unusual one; a model from Milwaukee, a newbie not on any of the standard sites yet, who found me through, I think, this blog. I rarely take shoots from newbies anymore, unless there's something unique or unusual about them. This one qualified, she was bald... not only bald, but hairless. No eyebrows, no hair anywhere.

Unfortunately, she wasn't ready for nudity, it was mostly a lingerie shoot. I booked it for early Sunday morning, only 12 hours after I'd gotten off the plane. Really it was a tune-up for other things later in the trip.

Most of the action was on the second weekend. Saturday was a shoot with Gia Maze, that's her in the photo above. At the time of the shoot she was three weeks away from a bodybuilding competition, pretty much in peak shape. She's a pleasure to work with, a very clear communicator, prompt, zero drama. For this one it was back to my post-industrial concept, a little more fitting under the circumstances. Normally those are black and white, but I just couldn't turn off the colors, the spectacular ink and the mane of red hair.

The intent had been to do another shoot on Sunday with an old friend, but she's dealing with some fairly serious health issues recently. We were both disappointed, but decided to wait a while to shoot, possibly when she's on the west coast this winter. Better to be safe. We'd just shot a couple of months earlier, so really all we were losing was a chance to take advantage of the fall colors, which were less than optimal this year.

I'd expected to be done at that point, but one more shoot fortuitously came together before the end of the trip, just barely. More on that a little later.

trinity #2

One more of Beth on the Trinity River; we're standing in full sunlight on a cobble bar along one shoreline, with the near-vertical rock outcrop on the opposite shore in full shadow.

trinity

Beth has become one of my favorite models. Initially we worked together on fashion shoots; a couple of years ago, at the end of a catalog shoot for a local designer who paid both of us, Beth approached me and asked about doing an art shoot. The next day we were out at the dunes creating images.

Although she already excelled at fashion work, there's a different kind of learning curve for art photography. There's nothing to hide mistakes. We did pretty well that first time, but it got better with each successive shoot. Beth is now at the amazing level in both the fashion and art nude genres, in my opinion. I've just finished choosing 44 images to work on from the most recent shoot, such a wealth of good things that it was very difficult to choose.

Beth is a chameleon, as are so many fashion girls. Her hair is different each time, and she seems to be a whole new person. This time she'd cut her hair short. She's also been dancing a lot, with a resulting obvious improvement in lean muscle tone.

We set the shoot for early October. Initially I'd planned a major excursion to a remote wilderness area southeast of where I live, it would have been two hours of driving each way with most of it on national forest roads. Fate intervened, a little before meeting time Beth called to tell me her car wouldn't start. So, a change of plans: I drove 30 minutes north and picked her up. On a whim, we decided to stay north, to shoot on the Trinity River instead.

It took about an hour to find a spot a little east of Willow Creek, a river access point that neither of us had ever visited before. The walk in was something a little less than a mile, and very steep on about half of that. The officially designated wild and scenic Trinity River flows in a deep canyon at this point, rocks and Douglas fir looming overhead on the walls of the gorge. The advantage of a difficult hike in, of course, is that there are typically very few other people around. We saw only two others on this warm and sunny day, two women who were friendly and open-minded enough that we just kept shooting as they waved and walked by.

The footing was often precarious as we scrambled over steep rock faces and boulder fields perched over the deep and cold river. The sun was bright and the shadows strong, but with some careful metering I was able to hang onto the highlights. An occasional puffy white cumulus cloud offered softer lighting. We stayed for several hours, alternately shooting and talking.

On the way out we paused at a large puddle in the trail, not far from the parking lot, for a few shots with a very different feel. Then it was back in the Jeep for the ride back to town.

Because of extended travel it's only today that I've had time to really work on the images.

nature

Alright, I'm in the mood to write again.

Lately I've been taking my photography in a completely different direction. Well, art nudes still predominate, but the mindset is different. I'm back to shooting mostly digital, with occasional brief side forays into film. I'm ending up with the finished product in color more often than not, which for me is a major shift. And finally, I've been getting out into the natural world more often, and that's led me into a fresh concept.

In the past I'd emphasized the post-industrial landscape in my backgrounds. Crumbling concrete, the works of humanity usually in disrepair, a commentary on the absurdity of materialism. It was also a challenge to conventional art photography, all the silly rules and the pseudo-pristine landscape which usually, when viewed through the eyes of an ecologist, wasn't really so pristine. Really, trying to pretend an image with invasive Eurasian buckthorn growing next to the model is "natural" will only fool some of the people some of the time.

But I'm feeling a little more optimistic these days, and I'm also willing to be a little more subtle in my imagery. That's led me back to the natural landscape. It's usually not completely pristine, but I'm able to get about as close as it's possible to get these days.

For a while I've been looking for a way to work in nature and still make a statement. Last spring I found a way to do that, coincident with a planned shoot with an experienced dancer. I'll come back to that, to the concept and that earlier shoot that triggered it. But first, I've had a recent run of interesting shoots, all in the past month or so, and I'll write about those first... and of course, share a few of the images.

again

Time to start this one back up again. Well, maybe. For a while, and then we'll see.

My writing efforts have been concentrated elsewhere, on entirely different subject matter, for a while now. I'm finding a much larger and more rapidly growing audience there, possibly because those writings are about things that at least arguably matter. This one... well, it's a creative outlet. It can be fun, but it doesn't mean a lot.

Here I'll continue to emphasize photography related things. I've been scaling back on that though, or at least changing emphasis. Shooting with fewer models, mostly with a few favorites and when it is someone new, it's generally someone very experienced. I've also been moving in different directions, shooting more fashion (partially because I have a couple of legitimate and published fashion models close at hand these days) while still overlapping with art. There's also more emphasis on publishing, with the three f11 books already out, a fourth scheduled soon, and some personal publishing projects in early stages as well. Those won't be only about models, i fact that's less than half of what I'm considering at the moment.

Perhaps I'll use this space to work through some of those decisions. As I said, we'll see.

Paradigm shift

Oakland - On Friday, while walking from a meeting in San Francisco's civic center complex to our office in the financial district, I realized that I was feeling so much more at home here than I had been last week in downtown Chicago... A place that I worked in for 15 years.

That was reinforced this morning when, on 880, a pickup truck lost a load of large plastic bottles all over the right lane. Three people pulled over and helped the guy pick everything up, while everyone else stopped and patiently waited til the lane was clear. No honking, no road rage, no passing. Again, so unlike what I'd witnessed most every morning on the highways of Chicago.

***

This morning, after not enough sleep, I did a shoot with Keira Grant out on the headlands. The light was perfect, fog just burning off, directional light but soft. It was a good decision to schedule just the one shoot here this weekend, fun without the stress that any more bookings would have brought.

Tomorrow I head home after a late morning meeting in San Francisco, and for the first time in two months there's no immediate travel on the horizon.

Hot city night

Yesterday I decided that I did want to shoot after all, just not with most of the local people who are offering at the moment. So instead I sent a text to Chrystyne and asked her if she was in the mood to shoot. The answer came back in minutes, "how about tonight?

Perfect, because it was too hot to do anything by day anyway.

We walked the few blocks from her place to the elevated train. She wore a very short and very tight black dress, and packed two changes of clothes in a bag. We took the train to the south loop, got off near the Board of Trade building and started shooting on LaSalle Street. It was still hot, 87 degrees and humid, and with lots of people on the streets.

We worked our way north on LaSalle, stopping twice for creative on-street changes of clothes. We ended near the Merchandise Mart, then hopped back on a northbound train.

There's so much light downtown at night, it was easy to shoot at 1/30th second most of the time at EI 640.

On the return train ride, there was a young guy passed out in his own vomit, in the midst of a crowded train car. As we traded mass transit for a car and did a short drive to get a snack, the craziness continued.... Three times, someone stopped in the middle of the street for no apparent reason, just parked mid block in the path of traffic. Then, cop cars converging from three directions, sliding to a stop a block in front of me, dragging two guys out of a van and throwing them up against the side of the vehicle... I didn't stay around long enough to see what that was about.

After dropping off Chryssy, I stopped at Exit about 1:00 am to see the post-apocalyptic burlesque performance. It was bad, actually. Bad fire dancing, worse than most of what I've seen from stoner girls on California beaches. And a too-fast strip tease by a cute girl who spent too much time in a corner where half the audience couldn't see her.

The edgy burlesque craze has perhaps been good in the sense of shaking things up a little, but the act gets old after seeing it maybe twice. Fire and nipple tape and grinders throwing sparks from metal plates can only mask a lack of experience and discipline for so long. There are things a girl with classical dance background can do that most of these girls can't. It will be interesting to see where this trend goes in the near future. Right now, its just overdone.

There were a few friends and acquaintances in the room, Natalya and Kristin and Peter and others. There was another offer to model, one I'll probably take because she's got a really interesting face. Then there was a bizarre moment when one of the performers interrupted my conversation with a friend... This particular performer being someone I've declined to photograph in the past.

This morning I worked after only four hours of sleep, but it was all worthwhile. When I woke from an afternoon nap, the heat had broken, the humidity fallen, it was in the 70s with a nice breeze as night fell.