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- Portfolio / Photographer Clint
- 2024-08-28T18:51:53+02:00
- 2024-08-28T18:51:53+02:00
More Of The Same
There's no question that this is an original idea -- it isn't. But I came to it honestly enough. Some most-likely-farcical post about "how to build a cabin in the woods out of pallet wrap" was entertaining enough and I laughed for a bit until I thought, "wow, that would look super cool to photograph someone inside something like that" and....well...there you have it. I was ready to do it. And then I forgot about it for a couple years. I tried playing with it a couple of times but maybe just didn't put enough effort into it. Anyway, it languished in the cluttered recesses of my imagination for a bit until a particular forest corner seemed interesting. In the past week I've tried the idea three times and could not be happier with the result.
Again, it's simple. I'm using food service plastic wrap instead of pallet wrap but it DID make a decent hammock! And I haven't gone TOO crazy with it....yet....there's more to come. So here are three models inhabiting the same(ish) structure and giggling like crazy when not being serious for the camera.
The Bird Watcher
We were maybe an hour into it when we realized we were not alone.
I guess I should back up...The summer season in the Pacific NW is fleeting, at best. There are those who brave the ice caves or lava fields or deeply dripping forests at other times of the year but I will admit to being a fair weather adventurer. I fell for the not-so-distant high desert a long time ago because it's more interesting in the shoulder seasons and even more survivable in the winter. But for throwing models into waterfalls or just generally being nude in nature, well....summer is pretty awesome. Over the past two or three decades, however, the increasing population of the NW has driven their Subaru Outbacks to weirder and wilder destinations, wearing puffy jackets and hauling over-sized water bottles deeper and deeper into wonderful woods. There is goddamned NOWHERE to get away from them.
I have been hooking around the less-traveled corner into this little nature preserve for a number of years. Once upon a time it was wildly exotic, beyond the boundaries of Our Fair City. These days it's practically a weekend living room for Portlanders and I can anticipate the Viet fisher folks, the sunset wedding photogs, over-excited hikers and, yes, an assortment of bird watchers skulking along the edges of the shallow lakes, keeping their eyes out for......us?
The set itself had taken half a day to build. I was using clear plastic-wrap to encase a stand of slim river-bottom alder and over the course of two days worked with two very different models who brought totally different perspectives to the concept. The more I built, the more I wanted to build. I want to make it a playground. I want to build a strip mall, a maze, a wonderland of plastic wrap that someone can wiggle through or cartwheel or laugh their way around. This is almost as much fun as throwing paint at people. And like all the best shoots the results are wildly at odds with the giggle fest that we created.
I don't know if it was coincidence but there was a bird watcher halfway around the curve of the lake both days. They seemed chill. I assume they had binoculars. They may have had some amazing lens and gotten their own shoot out of our frolic. Honestly, more power to them if they got something interesting! I found the images most interesting as black-and-white, high-contrast. More to come, I'm sure....
Revisiting The Scene
It's hard to believe but my wonderful model had to remind me that this entire trip had occurred! In my defense, it was an especially productive few months and she and I had been on an absolute tear across the countryside with absolutely epic shoots tumbling over one another. I had looked at this one and been a bit disappointed in myself and set it aside for almost a year until getting a nudge. Models, don't hesitate to nudge your photographers! I was juggling running a small production company, carrying out a summer season of music festivals and events, cramming shoots into every bit of spare time I could find and, yeah, forgetting to look closely at every little thing in the moment! I'm so glad she did.
This next week we're going to take a couple days to get out and shoot again -- Jordan has relocated to the magnificent Desert SW and we haven't seen each other in a few years so this is going to be new fun all over again! One of the ideas in my mind is to revisit this location and mood but shoot it with six years more experience. Will it work? Will it be different? Can we recapture the wild magic that we found the first time? I tend to shy away from repeating things. When I started I remember seeing a guy in Austria who posted picture after picture, always a different model but always the same LOOK -- the model emerging from a mountain lake in bondage-y harness gear. From the looks of it he planted a camera at the edge of the lake and had "those settings" ready to go. Looked like a multi-light setup, certainly more complicated than a lot of my natural light endeavors. But my takeaway was that I would cut my own wrists if I took the same picture every time. So for the last eight years I have restlessly challenged myself with new ideas and new looks, from early experiments in saturated light to an emphasis on natural light and camping adventures, to more recent thinking about strobe infill and creating sets in unusual locations.
We'll use this hot summer to do some revisiting. Maybe I can find something interesting in it!!
Models & Magic
We like to talk about "making magic" and I am the first to assert that photography is somehow more than the sum total of its technical bits. I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation yesterday with Jesse Ray Muse during a break from her usual habit of nosing around new places in search of places to shoot.
After almost a decade of compulsive work, I'm trying to slow myself down and think more, perhaps shoot less. It crossed my mind that my day might be better spent doing something more obviously productive and I couldn't have been more wrong. I also didn't manage to take a deep breath and slow myself down much. I was shooting for framing and keeping a minor eye on metering rather than squinting at the tiny screen in the lowering sun. We were visiting a meadow that I've been hitting every few weeks during our cold and gusty Spring and found that the plush field I'd grown accustomed to had become dry and brittle after a week of crazy high temperatures. More fun, the grass had gone to seed in armfuls of burrowing splinters and a layer of burrs waited eagerly for every step. I knew better than to wear socks but the water-sandals I had chosen for an earlier waterfall quickly gained an ankle bracelet of poky awfulness. Jessa was a total trooper and managed to make the place look like it was in its first blush of blooming wonder.
We both had an appreciation of maps and road trips and compared notes back and forth. The whole thing was so easygoing and off-the-cuff that on the way home I became afraid that we hadn't worked hard enough. That maybe we had missed an opportunity. I needn't have worried. There was a particular mood and, yes, magic to the afternoon that jumped up and presented itself immediately.
Shot mostly on a Nikon D800 with a trusty Sigma 24-105mm f4 that, tbh, has never looked like this before.
In The Beginning
I have a pair of origin stories. The one for polite society is totally true. Since I was a toddler my eyes were just beyond the limits of correction. As technology improved, they got worse. I rebelled against glasses as a tween but the agony of wearing hard contact lenses made it seem better to stumble around blind most of the time, refusing to subject myself to the ordeal. I had figured it out by high school but the club scene was hard on contact lenses. Long days and longer nights, particularly back when smoking was legal indoors, left my eyes hating me. I went back to glasses. Thick, coke bottle things. It got so bad that I couldn't see well at any point and any slip of the glasses was incapacitating. Frankly, the whole thing made me mad all the time. Mad at myself but willing to take it out on others. A kayaking trip down Baja handed me a detached retina after a day getting pounded by waves and the doc who fixed me up mentioned that I would be a good candidate for reconstructive surgery. That's a thing? You can do that? I held onto that sliver of conversation for a few years before having the money to do it. The doctor who did the surgery told me it was going to change my life and she was right. Shortly after, seeing the world more clearly (also lost some nascent cataracts in the process), I was lighting a gala event at the local art museum and became fascinated by dancers moving through the patterns of light. I reached for my phone to capture it and was disappointed at the pale rendition. It dawned on me that I owned the gear to do this any time, I just needed a camera that could recreate what I wanted to see.
About the same time, an eight year relationship was ending. My tall and dramatic Hungarian girlfriend had found someone who fed her cocaine and sent her home at dawn stumbling and slurring drunk. She would leave my house and turn her phone off. At some point in our endless dead-end conversations she told me that she didn't want to see me around the arts community. SHE was an artist. That was HER territory. I think I laughed out loud. I've hosted an art gallery for years, helped produce events with a variety of arts communities. Whether it's music or painting or circus or aerial....I know everyone and have lent a hand to something. But it stuck with me and as I began to try to express what I had seen using a camera I realized that maybe I was going to be the artist. Hell, in almost a decade I had seen her complete and sell exactly ONE piece. Her idea of art was that artists drank coffee and smoked at the cafe. WAY before I was ready, a friend saw some of my photographs (shown here), experiments in lighting mainly, and invited me to show something at her bar. I printed off a dozen pieces and sold two. So the less-nice side of the origin story was a bit of revenge. Winning. I sold more than you.
But the revenge-y part of it...that fell away quickly. I've never been good at being motivated by anger. I forgive pretty easily, I think. Not for everything but my pique will calm down. And while I began by thinking that this technique was going to be THE THING, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the input from my models. And then it became a challenge of finding THEIR stories and expressing them. And before you know it, I had lost whatever interesting edge I had and was just another portrait photographer heading out on adventures to do "nude in nature" stuff. LOL.
In actuality, I was very fortunate to meet a group of locally-based art models who were instrumental in teaching me about the ecosystem and their input really gave me direction and guidelines. Don't make Hailey roll her eyes. Find a happy place for Jordan River. How to take Floofie's grace and kindness somewhere....where is OUR intersection for this photo? Through several careers, I have always found circles of interesting friends. Growing up in the punk/post-punk Seattle scene of the 80's, the Grunge Years in Portland, the folk-pop scene that Portland's Eastside was drenched in, Burning Man,...hell, even my recent years seeing my friends grow up and into civic engagement...I've always found INTERESTING people and art models are certainly a fantastic genre for that. I've learned about myself quite a bit, as well. I have favorites, I have types. I had never really been single at any time in my life and I'll admit to using models as a faux dating life. I've only fallen in love with a handful of them (heart breakers, every one!) but it's given me some space to understand a lot of things that I had never taken the time to ponder before. I hope that the love and respect I have for them shows through. They are an amazing bunch, particularly in these weird and repressive times.
As we throw ourselves into summer, I am trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up, if at all. The pandemic stripped me of a lot of ideas I'd had about how life was going to go and I'm unsure about rebuilding the hamster wheel. But what options do we have? Run or die? In the meantime, I have thoughts about building unnatural sets in natural settings and a Rolodex full of artsy collaborators to push these ideas forward. Stay tuned. More to come!
Contact
- #oil
- #natural light
- #pale
- #redhead
- #piano
- #sleeping
- #nature
- #figurative art
- #model photography
- #naturallight
- #feathers
- #hips
- #form
- #pose
- #legs
- #shadows
- #corner
- #modelphotography
- #dramatic
- #portrait
- #lowlight
- #silhouette
- #sunset
- #stark
- #figurativeart
- #experimentalphotography
- #portraitart
- Info Photographer Clint
- 2024-08-28T18:51:53+02:00
- 2024-08-28T18:51:53+02:00
Obsessively breaking the sensor since 2016 with an overwhelming desire to see YOU.