My current favorite model, Sheldon Parnick, was back in the studio last week for a number of different set-ups, involving camera tricks, lights, wardrobe, accessories (like a hat, or flowers), and backgrounds. It was a lot of fun; I had a blast, and Sheldon seemed to enjoy it, too. Shooting involves play; the model has to have a certain freedom to try out different poses, expressions, and ideas, and the photographer has to come up with ideas, too.
I love capturing beauty, and I love experimenting. Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist and composer, was once asked by Miles Davis, the jazz trumpeter, “How do you play from nothing?” Jarret answered, “You know, you just do it.” He went on to say, “And that actually is the answer. I wish there were a way to make ‘I don’t know’ a positive thing, which it isn’t in our society. We feel that we need to ‘know’ certain things, and we substitute that quest for the actual experience of things in all its complexity. When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.” The same applies when you are shooting a model; you “play (almost) pure improvisation” in making the image. It is more like child’s play than anything else, where the visual imagination goes where it will. Sometimes the experiments fail. Sometimes the failures are still interesting. Sometimes the results are enchanting.
This time I probably tried to do too much; my ankle was still hurting a bit from a sprain, too. Next time I’ll limit myself to maybe three “big ideas,” and play with them.
The real challenge here is picking images from the 650 or so to show you (and her). Some were duds (but not many). Many are similar, but the pose or expression is different. Still, there are too many. I am trying to develop my “curating” skills, because I know that there is a “sweet spot” for viewers: too many images are fatiguing. In this blog article I had intended to put about 60, but the filter in Lightroom must not have done what I wanted, because there are about 190 here! I’ll create another gallery for the diehards who want to see another 140 or so. Feel free to comment somewhere if you find there are too many. 🙂 Or if you see one you particularly like.
Some of the images are in black & white, some are black & white with toning (warm or cool), and some look like they’re toned, but that’s only because “dragging the shutter” (leaving the camera’s shutter open after the flash has fired) has the effect of making the image more monochromatic, but warm. Almost all are in color, though the color treatment varies, depending on how the image struck me.
Without further ado, here are the images.
