Fotograf männlich
Afternoon Delight
A little mushroom tea to while away the afternoon turned out to be a little stronger than I anticipated and may have effected these edits....
The models here span a decade in time but all share my affection for their verve and style. I had been in a relationship that cut me off from friendships with women and in a way my journey through photography has been a means to re-form friendships at a time in life when my previous circles have drifted away from adventure and spontaneity. No dis on them -- not many of us are restless enough to continue the search decade after decade and I'd note that I've fallen into it to my own detriment. Generally, I spent my 20's in the music scene and had a particular group of friends who have stayed together as an orbit ever since. My 30's were a dive into Burning Man and that brought a new and wonderful circle of friends. Our 40's are when most of those folks realized they had to focus on careers and jobs (my day job in concert production and events keeps a certain unpredictability that I enjoy). People have families and they do stop going out on aimless road trips about that point! I was dealing with a jealous girlfriend through my 40's and it took awhile to realize that I was being cut off from my friends.
There was a breakup in my 30's, deeply crushing in its sense of permanent loss, that left me really feeling unable to speak to, well, ANYONE but especially to women. In a fit of brilliant desperation, I called a dozen friends and asked if I could "borrow" their wives for on evening. At the time there was a rooftop restaurant in Portland that sat in a sort of "end of Fight Club" vista and was rarely busy on a Thursday night so I spent the entire Spring bringing a series of beautiful women to dinner. I practiced speaking to women in a comfortable setting. I was taking them home to my friend, ffs, and they KNEW me so it wasn't as if there was any kind of pressure to "be someone". After six or seven weeks of this, the maitre d'hotel could not suppress his curiosity and when my "date" went to the bathroom approached me. A quick "how is everything this evening" became a more blunt and definitely less formal "dude, are you shooting porn? You're here every week with these amazing women!" which, as I think back, sort of presupposes that I was dating above my station? LOL. I told him and he really seemed to be in awe of my solution. I hope he's used the idea. We all need it at some point.
Fast-forward a dozen years and here was another devastating breakup, the first where someone had cheated on me. I hear she's a registered Republican now, so the whole "doing what you accuse others of" definitely fits. She had been a model and while my immediate origin story into photography isn't ALL about revenge I will admit that revenge was on my mind initially. It is NOT, however, enough to sustain a practice and the first shoot with a person knocked sense into me.
I didn't know where to find models and I had a technique or approach in mind so I put an ad on Craiglist and went to meet the first respondent with glamorous visions dancing in my head. And then she rolled into the restaurant across from my studio...in a wheelchair. Let there be no mistake -- I instantly realized that this woman had far bigger cajones than I would ever possess and I knew that I had to really WORK to give her a good experience. In a way it sorta set the tone for my future relationships in photography -- the bravery and boldness of models being the immediate emotional touchstone for everything.
Everyone has preferences in their models. I see photographers whose models are all improbably large-breasted or have a predisposition to sticking their tongues out a la Miley Cyrus. The brat look. I certainly have physical preferences but what I look for most is a creative push to do something different, to take an idea and run with it as an actor, to personify it and breathe into the moment. And working with models repeatedly deepens that conversation. Each of these women has stepped into the moment you see whole-heartedly.
Best Road Trips Never Taken
I gave up on a trip yesterday. Mainly because we had failed before and was looking down the barrel of consecutive cold fronts that would dump a mix of rain and snow as the area moved above and below freezing. Two years ago we had a wild rumpus of rain and woke to a quietude of white. The roads are rough at the best of times and wet snow over mud does not improve them. I called my traveling companion, pulled the plug and we went searching for waterfalls closer to home instead.
Even further away than where I'm not now is another photographic wonder recently discovered by the Instagram crowd. I've never been but do know the area. Like many of my favorite destinations the crush of people has grown. We used to arrive in the desert and run naked through it. Now we gauge how many other camps dot the shorelines of the ancient playas or how many cars are at the trailhead. Everything is marked, mapped and massively overgrazed. And while I feel pretty good about myself nearing 60, I am not fool enough to jump headlong over physical challenges that I once have might. I think about this on cliffs and wetly mossy rocks.
So today I'm home. Catching up on domestic chores and plotting the future. These are the trips I dream of and eagerly eye the first available set of days on my calendar.
In The Elemental
Pain occupies a unique place in human life. A thing to be avoided and a thing mythic in its nature to overcome. A thing to be nurtured in our hearts and that drives some of humanity's greatest accomplishments. The broken heart or an isolated soul suffers constantly.
In conversation with a pair of artist friends, welcomed into their studio and enjoying the muted light of a rainy afternoon, I mentioned that I held some pride at navigating a painful situation as best one could and one of my friends observed that an aversion to pain was often more dominant as we age. I am unsure that such is truly the case.
So many friends suffer the slings and arrows of age with dignity or resignation. And I know a good number who still retain a sense of adventure, particularly in romance, despite the possibility of pain. My own thought is that when some possibility presents itself one should simply go wholeheartedly and do the best you can. Make no mistake, the red flags are not a parade in your honor, crimson banners that wind and beckon. There was at one time a restaurant in Seattle called The Doghouse who featured an inspired drawing on their placemats of all the ways a person could wind up in the proverbial doghouse. An appreciable percentage were redheads.
The Archive Reveals All
My start in photography was very very backwards. I had no experience or real training other than having toyed with point-and-shoot cameras rather unsuccessfully. To this day I am not a "good" photographer.
The initial impetus was seeing aerial dancers rehearsing through some decorative lighting at an art museum gala. We were using high-definition glass gobos of winter branches for an autumnal effect and the shadows wrapping around the aerialists were entrancing. I had recently had corrective surgery on both eyes and it struck me that I could recreate this look to get a better picture than my phone was going to give me. Three days later I was at my local camera shop buying an entry-level Nikon and a wonderful 105mm lens (which turned out to be too long for the space I would use it in). My day job in production (mainly sound, lighting and projection, all playback oriented) did give me some understanding of noise floors, gain structures and the like. I kitted out a spare room in my warehouse with a ring of truss and theatrical lighting and became obsessed with losing and finding models in the patterning. The focus was, literally, less on the people than the technique and I certainly confused the hell out of the sensor on my poor little camera. I quickly discovered some features I wanted and moved up to a mid-range Nikon and then a full-frame. And then I moved outdoors.
The difference between nutso patterning and portraits in natural light could not have been a wider gap. It very much laid bare that I had learned the exposure triangle backwards, among other oversights. One that is jumping out tonight as I look through the archive is that I had some fundamental misunderstandings of the Nikon focus system. I'm still not impressed by Nikon's NX Studio software but I re-downloaded it in order to access the "show focus" feature. This particular day my D750 was set to AF-Area multi-point and it wasn't until nearly a year later that I realized I needed to swap over to single-point, which immediately did away with the stubborn habit of auto focus choosing the wrong damned thing to focus on! There were other instances of consistent misses but this particular shoot, with one of my favorite people who had made a point of coming to my state to work with me....well, it was a bitter evening when I got home and was able to look at these images full size. They looked FINE on the back-of-camera view (I also hadn't yet learned to zoom in and check, a shortcut that I very much appreciate).
These are, I suppose, how one truly learns a work flow. I've never quite been able to ditch handheld in favor of a tripod -- I want to be more active in choosing angles, to drop down to my belly to see what it looks like from there. And I'm not usually overly concerned with sharpness itself -- I use a lot of vintage manual lenses or lenses designed to be troublesome and I like the result. But there are times when something needs to be sharp.
As painful as it is, I spend a good amount of time on even the worst of shoots. And I don't throw them away in disgust. It's not just to rub my own nose in my mistakes but to come back and see the lesson again every so often. To think about the lesson and then wonder at it a bit and see if I'm drawing the right conclusion. And every so often, as tonight, I find a gem or two that survived my blunders.
This Is Why
It's been two summers ago that Eva and I loaded an entire Suburban's worth of camping gear and groceries and all the stuff of modern glamping and headed south to intercept our friend Lucy. We had guessed correctly on the amount of luggage she was carrying (almost none) and I had a set of camp-gear for her already. I had spent most of the Spring scouting locations and campsites and came up with some genuinely wonderful places. The thing about all of it is that isn't so much the place itself as giving a mood or just being part of the vibe of the day. This particular location I had stumbled across one morning and had returned to several times. It seemed as if the bird-watching grandmothers from the RV camp didn't hurry their morning coffee and that there was some little window in which we would have the lighthouse and beach all to ourselves. And so it was.
In the moments AFTER the trip, loaded up with a short week of pictures, I didn't particularly notice this batch. But tonight I made one little change and BINGO it jumped off the page. I will tip my hat to the two drift boat fishermen who floated silently off the lighthouse for the 45 minutes or so that we were there. They were quite respectful. I do wonder how often they have returned since in hopes of a repeat performance.
Kontakt
- #pale
- #redhead
- #oil
- #natural light
- #sleeping
- #nature
- #figurative art
- #model photography
- #naturallight
- #piano
- #feathers
- #hips
- #dramatic
- #portrait
- #lowlight
- #form
- #pose
- #silhouette
- #sunset
- #stark
- #legs
- #shadows
- #corner
- #modelphotography
- #figurativeart
- #experimentalphotography
- #portraitart
- Info Fotograf Clint
- 2025-08-05T06:30:56+02:00
- 2025-08-05T06:30:56+02:00
Obsessively breaking the sensor since 2016 with an overwhelming desire to see YOU.