April 28th, 2008
Elena
Location: San Francisco, CA
Model: Elena
As I mentioned last night, I had an opportunity to participate in a nude photography workshop on Sunday, at an historic Victorian house here in San Francisco. When I first heard about it I jumped at the chance to participate, and I was pretty excited about doing it. Unfortunately, it didn't really work out as well as I had hoped. I think I only have a few usable images after a day of shooting.
Part of the problem is it ended up being not so great timing. I wasn't quite prepared and I was feeling a bit under the weather. It was also an extremely challenging location in terms of lighting. Anything near a window was extremely bright, and anything away from a window was extremely dark.
The other challenge was the models themselves. While they were all very nice, I personally didn't think they were quite appropriate for the location. Or, at least, they weren't quite what I was hoping for.
This workshop consisted of 12 photographers, broken into 4 teams of 3, and 4 models. Each team had 45 minutes shooting each model, giving each photographer 15 minutes of dedicated time with each model. During your 15 minutes you directed the model and you could shoot anywhere that was open. Even though the house was pretty big, there were definitely the popular spots, and I think we did get in each others way a fair amount of the time.
Even though this workshop wasn't all I had hoped for, I'm still glad I did it. Every time I do something like this I learn a little more about what works, what doesn't, and what direction I want to go in with my photography. In this particular case I also learned a fair amount about using a strobe (flash) as an off-camera light source. I know almost nothing about flash photography, and I'm very interested in learning more.
This image is of Elena. It's kind of hard to tell, but she's laying on her back on a red leather sofa, which is on a red floor rug. I'm standing above her.
Tags: Color, Elena, Mask, Nudes, People, Women|
