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I really
like this image:
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Keira is remarkably comfortable in her own skin -- in
fact, she continued to walk around nude even between
setups. I believe that she prefers to be nude
all the time. I just love her confidence.
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I like how all the elements of this image balance out.
I like the composition.
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I love the splash of blue of her shorts as they lie
in that little patch of sunlight.
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The color & the light are perfectly exposed.
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There's a little action -- I like it when a model's
hands are occupied somehow.
In fact,
I like this image so much that I played with it, with alternative
cropping & artistic effects. Although I like these
variations (see below), I think I prefer this original treatment.
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I like this
image, too. I've got to admit that when I feature
the patch of sunlight, sometimes that's too much.
But here, it is only a minor element of the image, and we
can focus on Keira's amazing beauty. I just love her
muscular definition in her abs, and I love her direct eye
contact -- her lovely face looks especially inviting.
The past
several years, angel wings have become a glamour photographic
cliché, one which I have avoided. But I've got to
say that in images like this, the shadow of Keira's head
on the wall looks a little like folded dark wings to me.
This is especially true with the "paint brush"
effect version of this image.
(Roll your mouse cursor over this
image to see the artistic effect version -- what do you
think about this way of presenting the artistic effect?)
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We drop to
the floor for some exposures there. I was thinking
that I'd like to see some images with the window light sweeping
across Keira's figure, and I wanted to get Keira out of
the corner, where the lighting on her face was difficult.
Through
no fault of Keira's, I don't like these images as much as
I thought I would. But since I find my "near
misses" more instructive than my successes, I thought
I'd include a few of these images here. Here's my
problems:
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Because of the room's configuration, I had to set my
camera's zoom lens at its widest setting, and I just
don't think this ultra wide lens is flattering for Keira.
Here, it looks like her head & her shins are a little
too large to be right.
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Because of the room's configuration, I'm sitting quite
close to Keira, and I feel like I was invading her personal
space a bit. Don't get me wrong -- Keira never
indicated that she felt crowded or uncomfortable --
that feeling was all mine.
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I've been an advocate of keeping the camera axis low,
about the same height as the model's center of mass.
Here, in this particular image, I must have been holding
the camera up to my eye, and being taller than Keira,
I wound up looking down at her.
So, something
to mull over for next time. You'll see that we eventually
moved around a bit & find some better images.
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Things improved
a bit when we moved Keira closer to the floor.
Okay,
this image is a large part gimmicky, juxtaposing Keira's
feminine curves against all the straight lines & angles &
diagonals. It's not "high art", but it is
a bit of fun.
The geometric
nature of this image lends itself well to the "artistic
effects" that I've been enjoying lately.
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I stand up &
get dazzled by the geometry of what I see.
I have
a graduate degree in computer science, and during my school
years, I took many graduate level math classes. These
kind of images make the math parts of my brain work.
With a little information, I could tell you stuff like what
direction to window faces, what time of day this was, what
date this was, how far we were from the equator, and other
useless information.
Also
from a scientific point of view, it is interesting to me
how the light puddles under the window during the summer
and how the light stretches all the way across the room
during the rare sunny days in the winter months.
From
an aesthetic point of view, I like how the floor molding's
strong horizontal anchors the image and how the strong diagonals
give an interesting pattern to the image. I like how
it all makes sense eventually.
No disrespect
to Keira, but my math brain makes me wonder what this image
would look like if Keira was not in the image at all.
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This sweet
image is the last we made in the sunlight coming in through
the window.
I love
models with great (or even exaggerated) posture.
Also,
my camera's zoom lens is set at a more normal (as opposed
to wide angle) setting. I didn't know it at the session,
but after all the time I spent editing these images, I decided
to avoid using wide angle settings with Keira. She
has such a lovely figure and face that I just didn't want
to introduce any wide angle distortions.
After
this image, I plan to move on to the next concept (see the
next page). This setup would involve closing the shade
on this window, putting up the background, bringing in the
strobe lights & light stands & soft boxes, setting
up my camera to fire the strobes, etc. During this
time, Keira wanders over to the other side of the living
room & plops herself down in the big comfy chair to
wait. The day is warm enough, and she doesn't feel
the need to cover her nudity.
After
wrestling with all these changes for the setup, I turn around &
see the lovely Keira lounging in the big comfy chair, and
I decide to snap a few exposures of Keira, relaxing, being
herself, in the living room's natural light.
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