Victoria, Back Stairs

Reality check: by now, I'm in my fifth & last hour of my modeling marathon. Both models exceeded my expectations -- both were beautiful, and more importantly, both were fun to work with. Their energy & enthusiasm help with my fading energy. By this time, I am feeling it -- I've already noted on previous pages that my attention to detail was dwindling.

So, I make perhaps the best move of the day: I can think of no better way to conclude my model marathon than to invite Victoria to the back stairs.

It is a big, big change to move from studio lighting to natural light. With studio lighting, your role as photographer is to craft the light to suit the subject. With natural light, it is your role to utilize the existing light to its full advantage.

Having a beautiful & natural model doesn't hurt, either. Moreover, Victoria is experienced, and she has an instinctive understanding of light. She immediately took to the floor, because when standing, the low tops of the windows would cause the light to drop off of the model's face (which happened with Brooke's visit to the Back Stairs). Further, without any direction from me, Victoria just knew to "cheat" her face towards the light coming in the window.

Boy, that makes her a dream to photograph!

Here's an interesting thing: the light on the back stairs is soft, the walls are white. Victoria has clear, fair skin and very dark hair. Thus, the color digital images aren't all that different from the "colorized" digital images. Compare these two images.

I just thought that was interesting. Of course, I prefer the "colorized" version.

This is a bit of a different look for Victoria. She does a lot of glamorous posing, but here we have simple lighting, light make-up, and an open & direct look. I like it.

That chenille blanket is a favorite. I actually have two, a light brown & a darker brown blanket. This one especially looks good against the carpet on the back stairs. You guys were looking at the blanket & the carpet, weren't you?

Using her intuitive appreciation for good light, Victoria suggested that we do some exposures with her sitting on the window sill (thereby enhancing my reputation in my neighborhood, no doubt). This is the test exposure made with the digital camera. There was enough light coming in from the skylights & bouncing off the white walls to provide light on the side away from the window. She looked great. So we went to town.

I put in these back stairs. They were a bear to design -- the first draft of the design would work well, but only for people who were less than four feet tall. I always regretted putting that electrical plug in that wall -- it often shows up in a lot of the pictures I make in the back stairs (and sometimes I use Paint Shop Pro to remove it).

You were looking at the plug, weren't you?

Actually, I like this picture a lot; Victoria is all natural beauty, and there is a sense of the space, too. I don't do that enough -- include a sense of the surrounding area in photographs. Perhaps someday, I'll do that more. I should. I like pictures like that.

By this time, we were coming to the end of the sitting (and a very long & very fun day for me). Time for one last concept. I decided to see if I could improve upon something I tried with Leona, the last time she visited the back stairs (see the last picture on this page). There's not a lot of light on the back stairs -- even using ASA 400 film, I was making exposures at maybe f/4 at 1/30th of a second. But this gives me the opportunity to change the shutter speed to something like a quarter or a half of a second & letting some movement become a blur. Like I said with the skirt & movement pictures of Victoria: it's a good thing to relinquish control a bit.

Pretty trippy, huh? I like these pictures, but I think I can refine the process a bit. I'll have to think about it some more.

Assessment
Victoria	The Model Marathon	Digital vs Film
Victoria has got to be one of the best models I've had the pleasure to photograph. She is a true beauty with a svelte & lovely, all natural figure. But more significantly, she is energetic, creative, enthusiastic, supportive, and fun. Even more -- she has an intuitive sense of the qualities of light & knows how to present herself in each situation. She has my highest recommendation.	It was a great pleasure to meet both Brooke & Victoria, and I love many of the pictures we made together. And there was something exciting to devoting myself to a full day of image making. In the end, we exposed 23 rolls of film, more than two full batches, and as you can see, it took me several weeks to work my way through all that darkroom & web site work. Would I do it again? Probably not. Towards the end, I got tired, and as noted, I lost some attention to details. Victoria didn't quite get my best work, but there are some high spots. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do more pre-planning, making sure I had a checklist of setups & other details.	During the sitting with Brooke, I made an exposure with the digital camera that I liked as much as any of the film & paper images. In fact, it inspired an essay on the Essays & Blogs page. Up until now (including during the Model Marathon), I just used the digital camera to check the light balance of the studio setups -- I wasn't too careful about precise exposure to about fine tuning the pose. In the future, however, I think I'll make more digital exposures, and I'll ensure that I am as careful with the digital exposures as I am with the film & paper exposures. It's also of interest to me that the colorized versions of the digital images still look quite a bit different from the film & paper images.

Whew! I'm beat.