Extended Maintenance

We’re refurbishing the old gallery over the next month or two.   

Until the dust clears and we’re ready to re-open the doors, I’m posting a small selection of my work over on Flickr.   

Flickr

Note: Click on the headlines of a post to see all the photos and all comments.

This theme is a bit unclear on what to do in places. I’m working on that.  Click on the headline of the post to see the post, photos and comments. Clicking just on the photo only takes you to the photo, not the rest of the post.  I’m working on a fix for that.   I’m also in the market for a new theme and would love suggestions for photography oriented themes that integrate seamlessly with NextGen Gallery.

A View from Above – The Rest of the Story

In a previous post, I presented a shot of my wife, Wendi, that we submitted to Molly’s Daily Kiss Sinful Sunday photo blog.  As any photographer or model will tell you, when you’re shooting for a couple of hours with multiple costume and set changes, you always come away with at least a few great shots.    Here I present to you the ‘Rest of the Story’.   Included at the end are a couple of “just for the hell of it” shots.  They’re all technically work safe, but I wouldn’t push it with most HR departments.  So click on the MORE button and enjoy.

Sinful Sunday – A Shot from Above

Over on one of my favorite blogs; Molly’s Daily Kiss, they have a photo link list called Sinful Sundays.   Each week there’s a new theme presented and then a guest author picks their favorites.

I haven’t participated in one of Molly’s themes in way too long so I asked Wendi (my much prettier half) if she’d pose for it.  She was delighted and spent most of the day playing with cloth and clothes and lingerie and all the other fun things that go into a shoot like this.  More photos from the shoot soon.  This one’s for Sinful Sunday.

Click on the lips at the bottom to go to Molly’s Daily Kiss for links to the rest of the participant’s posts.  Enjoy

Sinful Sunday

Devious Beauty in Red Silk

Good scotch, a fine cigar, soft silks, a beautiful woman.  What more could a photographer possibly want?

It’s not often I get another photographer in front of my camera, but I was blessed with that opportunity this weekend.   Below the fold are the first few edits from a marathon 5+ hour session with this lovely lady.

Yep, they’re not safe for work. Nudity, tobacco and alcohol abound beyond the fold.   I’m not sure which is more offensive to the prudes, to be honest.

Beauty in Chains

What started as a simple lighting test to experiment with lighting angles, fabric textures and skin textures or muscle highlights ended up becoming a much more intense shoot than planned.  As you’ll see from the images below the fold, the look is intense, textured, detailed and appears to have a fairly complex lighting setup.

What i used, however, is anything but complex.  I used two speedlights inside 30 inch softboxes with radio slaves.  For most shots they were set to 1/8 power and set perpendicular to and about 6 inches from the wall and about 3 feet from the model.  They’re above the model’s head and tilted down to give a good wash of light over her body and still throw a soft hightligh on the wall.   Because they’re softboxes insted of grids, i got a good highlight on the chains and cloth as well.

I would have preferred either larger softboxes or stip boxes to give me a fully parallel light rather than the downward cast light I have now.  However, sofboxes large enough (72 or 80 inch would be perfect) would not have fit in the space we shot in and strip boxes that tall would have been almost as unwieldy and not given me the wash on the wall that I ended up liking very much.

The sescret to the complexity of the scenes is in the textures and contrast of the intricate cloth, the way it’s draped and the contrast with the wall behind it. The mix of hard chain with the soft silk of the cloth is mirrored in the intense textures in the model’s skin.  Even the smooth skin of the lower back has an unusually pronounced texture.

I’ve included a quick snap of the light and prop setup that shows the space we were shooting in (my bedroom, in this instance).  So jump into the comments and tell me how you’d shoot something like this or if this inspired you to shoot something, post it somewhere then come back here and etell us about it.

The images below are not safe for work.  The nudity is mostly implied, but it bondage and eroticism isn’t implied,  it’s right out in the open for anyone to seel.

A Calamity in Silk

The lovely Calamity Janet, one of my favorite redheads to grace my studio this year showed me how much fun several yards of yellow silk can be.

As usual, Not Safe For Work (NSFW). You’ve been warned.

Caught in the Web.

Jessica posed for an impromptu shoot with a fantastic iridescent spider web covered fabric back in 2009.   Only a couple of these shots ever saw the light of day until now.   She had no makeup, no hair styling, just her and the drape in front of a white wall.

Over the ensuing six years, my editing skills have improved significantly so I thought I’d see what I can do with them now.   This gallery is the result.   Enjoy.

NSW gallery behind the cut.

Power Stations

These are the cooling towers for one of the nuclear power stations in Tennessee.  I think this was the Watts Bar station, though we passed not far from the Sequoyah station during that same trip in 2011.

Enjoy.

A most fabulous photowalk with Trey Ratcliff

Edit:  Eight more photos added. (8/14)
Edit 2: Two new and One re-edit posted. (8/17)

A few weeks ago, I got an odd e-mail about my Google+ community; Atlanta Photography being used for Trey Ratcliff’s Atlanta Photowalk.  Sadly, if you’re reading this and weren’t there, you missed it.  You can read the details here.  People have been posting their photos to my g+ group with the tag #TreyUSA and #AtlantaPhotowalk.

Enough words though.  You all come here for the same reason you surf the web and (if you’re old enough to remember them) buy *those* magazines.  You know the ones I’m talking about.

So here are the first fruits of the Photowalk last night.  There will be many more images added to this gallery over time.  I took almost a thousand shots in 3-shot bracketed groups.  HDRI is the focus of Trey’s work so of course I had to shoot for HDRi.  I shot these at +2, 0, -2 stops which gives me somethign on the order of 16 stops of dynamic range (have to confirm that number when I can find the time.. it’s off the top of my head and may be even wider than that).

Enjoy the photos.