Lillian

Something a little more elegant. I've found that violinists make the best models. At the very least, they have amazingly expressive hands— they've been unconsciously practicing on making them articulately eloquent since childhood. No posing necessary on that front...

Joe & Lissa

Burlap is a good all-purpose background (see the last post...). I think that I paid $40 around twenty years ago for a ton of remnants that I keep stuffed in an old steamer trunk (which looks like I stole it from a pirate). I can throw them over another backdrop, throw them on the floor and walk on them, stuff 'em back in the trunk... they just keep looking even better! They're pretty awesome.

Percolate

My ropework images tend to have a rawness and a visceral immediacy to them. I think that these two are a bit more on the elegant side. Being tied up can be very calming and relaxing— everything is relative. Also, a side note— I think that the burlap backgrounds work best with my bondage work, as it perfectly matches the feel and texture of the hemp rope.

Little One

Keeping the aesthetic of the last few posts...

Sienna Luna

These natural outdoor nudes are me going back to my past. More like work from ten, fifteen, even more like twenty years ago. Definitely changing gears a bit. Slightly Edward Weston influenced. I love Edward Weston, but I have rarely taken much direct inspiration from him, until recently. Seems to work here well enough!

Tanya Dakin

Reminiscing the days before digital: I remember ogling the Canon 10D digital camera when it came out in 2002— I steadfastly clung to my EOS-1V film camera and told it... you will not be replaced by this new-fangled not quite good enough yet digital thing-a-ma-jiggy (I was already an old man at heart), and I still have important work to be done in my brand-spanking-new-better-than-ever darkroom. Then came the 20D in 2004— well, the poor EOS-1V didn't have a chance, despite that even today it is still a pretty awesome camera. Here are a couple of film images from 2004. Tanya said she loved the fact that I was still shooting film and giving out real prints from the darkroom, and I didn't have the heart to tell her I was about to try something different...

Lucy

This image represents an example of an ongoing project that I've been working on during the past few years. I've been going back to older images and completely starting over from scratch, and finding new ways to finish them. That is the beauty (and possibly the frustration) of the potential of negatives— whether film or digital. The possibilities of what a technically good negative can be turned into are endless. In the past, my modus operandi was to retain good solid blacks, make sure that the lightest areas were not blown out- and then let everything else fall in between. This was a logical way to work in the darkroom with film, with some burning & dodging here and there to help. Using layers in Photoshop, though, allows me to exploit areas of detail that would have been impossible or at least extremely difficult in the darkroom. Rather than exploiting the possibilities of distorting or retouching images, I'm finding that instead, I can create levels of detail that inherently exist, but were way beyond my reach in the darkroom. That is to say that I'm not making detail up, but merely excavating it very carefully, much the way an archaeologist carefully excavates a dig with fine brushes and other tools. After all, that's exactly what Photoshop is anyway- a very powerful tool. Of course, all tools can be used either heavy-handedly or with fine precision. I've discovered that using fine precision is allowing me to make images that are hyper-real, instead of becoming hyper fake.

Speaking of detail, the images that I post here are actually scaled down versions in order to be viewed easily on the blog- if the image is clicked on, a larger and more detailed version can be seen...