Rodislav Driben

Language of colours

There are two major forces that drove me to the realm of staged fine art photography. One of them as it is not hard to guess is eternal beauty of feminine body and that is why my major genre is artistic nudes. Not less important force is magic of colour tonalities games that I inherited from my passion to the realm of paintings. How the two passions coexist and which of them is the dominant?
As a novice in nudes genre I tried various popular sub-genres with depiction of nude body. I made shootings of nudes in nature, in city centres, in rented apartments and in commercial studios. Shooting nudes outdoors was a real fun, sense of adventure was all there and adrenaline was very high when shooting nudes in the middle of city before police arrives, or traveling with models to distant locations to discover an abandoned shipwreck or rock formations with fancy geometry that can be used for a stage. However when analysing results of my outdoors shootings I came to conclusion that it is not what I aim to achieve. The light and colour palette of these images did not satisfy me and I have to surrender to monochrome photography. That is why I stopped all my outdoors activities in 2019 and concentrated on studio shootings to master the language of coloristic composition. There was no journeys through forests and mountains, but there was an exciting journey through the peculiar theme: human and his/her colours. I made a progress on this route and my works were numerously chosen as winners in many international annual competitions. Still the research is actively going on. There are so many things to discover and working with every new model I learn something new. I love compositions when the natural skin tone provides an excellent central tonality for the picture. Sometimes nudity is not appropriate for the composition I create and I cover my models with textile to achieve an optimal picturesque effect.