Jennifer, Back Stairs

During the Model Marathon, Victoria showed me that the light is better when the model is lower than the time of the window. Jennifer starts on the floor, but we move around a bit.

Long hair & dancer's arms -- how can you go wrong? A non-dancer would find this kind of arms-up pose awkward, but Jennifer makes it look totally natural.

Actually, you do have to be careful -- several of the poses that dancers find comfortable & natural are designed to look good from a distance, like from the back of the audience, but the nature of studio photography is a bit more up-close than that. So, you've got to be careful about some of the poses that dancers select. On the other hand, these very same poses help make a dancer take up a good deal of space, which is perfect for outdoor photography. It's a shame that Jennifer & I didn't get outside -- I bet she's a terrific outdoor model!

This!

This is what a woman should look like! I think this image shows off Jennifer's figure perfectly. She is relaxed, toned, graceful.

This is a favorite from the sitting.

I knew I would like this image as soon as we made the exposure. We actually worked on the pose a bit, getting the legs positioned just so. As a backup, I made a digital exposure of this pose, too. I'll present it below, in its original color version & its "colorized" version -- which do you prefer?

I pull down a funky chair from the guest room at the top of the stairs, and Jennifer makes herself comfortable. She has great instincts -- the light on her is very nice, but I promise her that we'll get back to this horizontal theme later (and sadly, I forgot, so we never did). Too bad! We did some more upright pictures.

There really isn't a lot of light on the back stairs, and I don't augment the natural light coming through the various windows. As a result, we use a relatively slow shutter speed -- this is a digital image, and I'd guess the shutter speed is about 1/20th of a second. I love, love, love the slight blur in Jennifer's hands as she moves them to adjust her hair. It is such a natural gesture.

Yeah, we should definitely have done more of this, too!

Jennifer's posing style is like a three-ring circus -- there's always a lot of stuff going on! She is a perpetual motion machine! Perhaps some photographers want their models to sit still & strike a pose, but not me -- I want a model to move, to dance around, to show me continual changes to basic concepts, and to show me new directions. Jennifer does this wonderfully. I saw more that afternoon that I could hope to photograph.

Did I mention that we not only exposed the standard 10 rolls (10 exposures per roll) of film, but we also exposed almost an equal amount of digital images? With Jennifer, the digital exposures worked out really well -- I was able to show Jennifer what I was looking at, and we were able to make fine-tuning adjustments to poses & lighting. As a fellow photographer, she was totally into all aspects of the process.

When Jennifer twisted around on the funky chair & laid down on it, I was reminded that I've been wanting to ask models to get horizontal more often.

Jennifer's sitting concludes on the next page:
Horizontals