A poorly planned art nude shoot is not going to go well.  Go in without a clear concept or even a concept beyond “nude woman in front of X” and you risk creating a boring image.  The whole goal of the Art Nudes in Nature workshop was to avoid boring images.  Hit the jump to see if we met that goal!

Last weekend’s Art Nudes in Nature workshop (presented by the SOPHA) was taught by three instructors: Bud Thorpe, myself and GT.  We each have very different styles and philosophies, but we agreed on one central theme, namely that the day was about the creative process and not the gear.  Gear should be a vehicle to the end result, not an end in and of itself.

In my last post, I wrote about how I used inspiration from a trip to see the Giant Sequoias, enormous trees that live to be thousands of years old, to come up with a concept.  My concept was that, from the point of view of an ancient organism like the Giant Sequoia, our short existence is only a shadow upon the landscape.  So in my mind, I am looking to create something that communicates our impermanence in relationship to the landscape.  I see a pallet that is fairly dark and shadowy (no big surprise there) and images that have a vaporous or diffuse quality to them.  Now, how to use different techniques to get there.

For my first two groups I chose to use the Fuji X100 camera for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost is the camera’s leaf shutter, which allows it to sync to a strobe all the way up to 1/4000 of a second.  Why is that a big deal?  Well, it let us cut out most of the ambient light on a very bright day, bringing our pallet down to something more dark and moody.  It also let us light the model with a small speed-light stuck out on the end of a monopod.  Here is an example:

Even though we were working on the edge of the woods, the images look dark and moody- just what I had in mind.  I left it to the students to bring a final image from the concept.  If I can get some of their images, I’ll post the results.

This setup has a number of advantages.  When working with a VAL, you have a lot of creative freedom- move the light a little over here, or a little over there, etc- so your compositions can be very flexible.  Plus, the lightweight setup allows access to places where it would be tough to take a full size studio strobe.  We were climbing over rock walls and through dense brush most of the day.  Finally, a light weight setup like this is easy to pick up and move, something that can come in handy if an onlooker gets too curious about your shoot!

The other set up I utilized should have horrified any true gear hound.  We have a trio of older gentlemen who definitely appreciate fine camera gear- we’re talking Nikon D800, D4 and Canon 5D Mk III guys.  So what did I have them use to get a soft, ethereal image?  This:

Yep, I had our gear hounds mount a $35 dollar plastic lens (available here at Photojojo) on a camera that costs 100x more.  And you know what?  They loved it!  These things are plastic lens, f8 (-ish), zone focusing cheapies, but they do produce something special.  We had to push a lot of light from a studio strobe to punch through that aperture, but the results were pretty neat.  I forgot to take a shot with the main setup, but here is a quick one that Em and I set up:

I like the softness and the color flare- it kind of has an twilight shadow feeling. I’ll see if I can get some of the class images to give a better idea of the results.

So there you have it.  We started with a concept of the body as a shadow on the landscape, formed some ideas on what feel and color pallet should be and only then did we pick tools to get us there.  Finally don’t be afraid to experiment even with nutty ideas.  Sometimes those give the best results!