In early January 2010 I decided that although my photography had improved over the previous year, that I needed to do something different if it was to improve over the forthcoming year. I decided that I would like to do more nudes in the landscape, so being a techy person I googled ‘nudes in the landscape’ and somewhere down the list was a certain Dave Hunt who had a few months before been awarded ARPS and ABIPP distinctions with some stunning images, just the sort of images I wanted to produce.
So ‘as one does’ I emailed him and asked if there way anywhere I could see his successful panel images, and nice guy that he is he obliged and asked to see some of my images. So I emailed him a Flickr link to some images of Ivory Flame a model who I had shot before and got some good images from, and for very good reason will be appearing in a lot of my future blog entries – for which I make no apology whatsoever. Dave said that he liked the images, and that if ever I was passing the Highlands….
As it was a big ‘0’ birthday this year, I decided to contact Dave and take him up on his offer. It began with thinking about one and a half days of shoots, but by the time it was finished it was seven solid days of art-nude photoshoots in Scotland. A fantastic ‘early’ birthday present from my wonderful wife.
Well it begin in April with a drive up to Perth where the lovely Chrissie Red and partner Rory very kindly put up a complete stranger for the night, and the following day we picked up Holly(IvoryFlame) and dropped off Chrissie and Rory back at their apartment before going on to Daves.
Rory has recently taken up photography, so it seemed appropriate to do a shoot in their apartment, especially as the evening window light was wonderful. So tripod out and off we go…
All images are simple RAW captures played around with in Lightroom 3 messing with some presets (hence I haven’t Photoshopped out the plug sockets in some of the images – apologies ladies!!!)
I have tried to make the tones of the images sympathetic with Holly’s skintone and hair colouring. With hindsight we would have removed the cushions, but how many people can produce images like this in their living room?
The window light was great, changing quite rapidly, so you could get different images within seconds of a previous shot. I just love the pool of light on Holly’s head.
We did take some of Chrissie and Holly, but mainly Holly as Rory had already got lots of images of Chrissie – althoug you can’t have too many images of Chrissie :)
I quite like the Lightroom Creamtone preset used on this image.
And finally sometimes you don’t need to mess around with a picture, as its perfect as it is.
So thank you very much Chrissie and Holly (and Rory), this is day 0, as the seven days of shooting don’t start until the day after. Watch out for posts on the other 7 days.
3 Comments
Lovely, Tim.
I particularly like the first one.
Very soft and gentle, though I would expect nothing less than great work from yourself and Holly.
I was happy to find this old post of yours, Mr Pile, since it was a behind the scenes look at one of your prize winning photos.
Knowing something about a photo makes it so much more meaningful to me. I feared it might ruin the magic but not in the least (for me).
Gosh this is an old post Mr Pope, but it’s good to see where I cam from. Fortunately my post-processing has improved since then, and that first image went on to become very successful :)