It was a kind of dream of mine. Creating nude motion blur pictures. I had been thinking about this for years but on the one hand I did not have the courage (really) and on the other hand I did not know a person who would be interested in being my model.
Shooting models for the first time about a year ago was a big step forward. To me it was not only doing some photography. It was exposing myself to the person I was shooting, needing to direct this person, having the “responsibility” of getting it right and delivering an acceptable result. No self-inflicted pressure of course… :-) But as it happened the experience of shooting people turned out to be amazing and gratifying. I liked the interaction, I liked the attempt of capturing the persona, I liked the results.
So why not the next step? Shooting nudes. Well, this was the same issue with the same inhibitions again. But at least I had this previous experience that went indeed quite well.
So now a good friend of mine (thank you, Marilena!!) made me aware of a person who works as an actress and acting coach and who had previous experience with nude photo shootings. And on her website she even said that she was interested in further cooperations. Ok, so let’s get in touch! After writing some messenges we had a preliminary meeting, I showed her some of my motion blur work from the previous months and she said yes. So we met last week and had a photo shoot.
Thekla made it easy for me. She has an education as body actor which means, expressing herself through body language is her professional tool. I explained what I wanted, that I was aiming at creating pictures of her moving. From then on I actually did not need to do anything but following her with my camera. We were shooting for a little more than an hour and she was inventing and creating movements all the time. All in all we had maybe 5 minutes break time. So after the shoot we were both sweating and completely mentally and physically drained. And I had sore leg muscles for the following two days.
For me it was a huge challenge to follow Thekla’s movements, that were fluent, abrupt, aesthetic, unconventional, bizarre and continuous. She was walking, running, lying and tossing and turning on the ground. With props, with a hat, a scarf, a veil, a fabric bag over her head (!) or without any items. I just had to follow her which per se was already a big task. I started the shoot with my D850 Nikon camera but after some minutes I threw the heavy thing away and continued with the tiny, mobile and versatile GR III. Forget full frame, try to get a picture in the first instance!
Nudity was not an issue. It became part of the expression, part of the process, part of the visual impression. There was absolutely no lewdness from either side. I was so focussed on my photography, on her movements, on the aesthetics, on getting the right shots that I barely was aware of her nudity. Or, I was aware but I was fully focussed on my job and I integrated her naked body into my vision of what I wanted to achieve creatively.
All in all I shot around 600 frames. The following evening I sat down and reviewed the lot and culled the pictures. I extracted 100 pictures for further consideration for processing. On the following day I was sitting for 11 hours processing my pictures. Eventually I ended up with 30 pictures that I finished.
Having tried textures in the past months I was wondering how I should process the pictures. Eventually I decided to process them in a conventional way in Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex and not to use textures. I wanted to be able to control the results entirely which obviously you cannot do with textures. And if I really want to use textures I can still do that in a second step.
So, thank you very much Thekla!! You made it easy for me and I enjoyed the shooting thoroughly.
If somebody is interested in Thekla’s website, she has allowed me to share it here. Some of her pictures on the website don’t open. She is aware of it and will try to fix this soon. http://theklagaiti.com/en/
I will now certainly continue with this creative process of shooting motion blur pictures, portraits and of course also nudes.