Corner Floor

Ashley is a new-to-me local model; she's been on the scene for a little while, but we finally connected for this first sitting together.

As it turns out, Ashley was a bright spot for me -- her visit comes in the middle of a huge run of bad luck. I won't bother you with all the domestic misfortunes (like broken chair, broken oven, broken DVR, etc.), but there has been a big long run of troubles. Taking care of all these mishaps makes me hate being a grown-up. They are very distracting.

Several of these problems do have direct impact to my photography. I will talk about those throughout this commentary.

I really like starting sittings (especially with new models) by photographing them in the clothes they wore to my door and then snapping away while they remove their clothes. It's obviously exciting, and it gives the model something to do with her hands.

Here's Ashley -- beautiful, great face, and a long, lean, sleek figure. She's sweet & easy to be around. My first impression was that we were going to have a good time.

This is fast becoming my favorite corner. It has great light, and I've made some really fun pictures here.

Here's something I sometimes do. When I find myself getting bored or burned out, I tend to shake things up a bit. So, here, I'm using natural light & long-ish exposures (around a quarter of a second or more). So much of my photography is exercising great control over the image, but by using the longer exposure, I'm relinquishing control to happenstance.

So, the blur is intentional. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Ashley is enthusiastic about removing her clothing. That's always a good thing. A couple of other points that make these images work well -- I'm using a very wide angle lens, which does good things: in many of these pictures, Ashley's lovely long legs look even longer, and it allows me to hunker down close in this tight spot. Also, I'm continuing with my recent decision to keep the camera lens low -- here, the camera is down around Ashley's rib level.

I am liking the blur. I've got to admit something -- my recent vision problems are continuing, and the tiny LCD screen of my digital camera is difficult for me to see, so I'm not checking these images closely or often. But perhaps digital photography is spoiling me. When I work with film, it's often two or three sessions in the darkroom before I get to take a good look at the resulting images. Still -- that blur is something special.

Y'know, many of my favorite & most creative images involve long exposures. In fact, I still consider some of my dance photographs to be some of my best.

One problem / challenge with long exposure people pictures is that if there isn't enough blur, the image just looks to be of poor quality. Here's an example -- too little blur. I figure you've got to have a significant amount of blur or no blur at all.

I do this "getting started" setup a lot. It is interesting to me to see how a model undresses. Some are casual & matter-of-fact about it. Some do a little striptease. Some take their time. Some don't.

It seems to me that Ashley was nude in a heartbeat. Simple as that.

Ashley has a long, lean figure that is a pleasure to photograph.

I'm using the tilting/swinging LCD screen to frame my picture. Admittedly, it is difficult to hold the camera perfectly horizontal or vertical when you are holding it down close to the floor. Here, I'm not quite vertical. Oh, well.

That's a man thing, I think. Men & women tend to compose images differently. Men tend to ensure that one edge of an image is parallel to the ground, while women are less concerned about that. (I play a game -- when I see a photography, I try to guess the gender of the photographer -- I'm right ~80% of the time).

I have to admit that, for me, photography is a cerebral exercise. Some photographers just react to what they see, and there is merit to that, but I tend to think about it a lot.

I used to be a software engineer. By my own admission, I became famous for making "off-by-one" programming errors. For example, if I had to design a loop to execute a formula ten times, I would usually make an error and execute the formula nine or eleven times. Now this really wasn't a problem -- I knew that I had a tendency, so when I designed my own testing, I would test all boundary conditions to make sure that I did it right. (If I caught my errors before I released the code, my errors didn't count.)

How does this relate to photography? Well, everything I do relates to photography. In this case, I was aware that a low camera perspective was pleasing to me, so I asked myself, how low can I put the camera & still produce a pleasing image. In this case, I put the camera on the floor -- I couldn't get any lower without digging a hole. And still, I produced an image that I find pleasing.

Whoops!

Ashley is beautiful, sweet, and enthusiastic. She moves well & responds well to direction. You will notice that she does have tattoos (sometimes I edit them out, but other times I don't/can't). I am known for my aversion to tattoos, but Ashley is a special case. At the time of this sitting, Ashley just found out that she was pregnant, and we have agreed to document her pregnancy. These images were made last December, and I'm drafting these pages in March. Right now (March), Ashley is five months pregnant & she is just beginning to show. In fact, I photographed her again just yesterday, and we plan to get together for a quick (one hour) sitting once a month until the baby arrives. Wish her luck!

This sitting continues with House Tour