Some few weeks ago I had a photo shoot with R., who is a professional photo model in Auckland.
She had approached me after finding me on Model Mayhem and taking a look at my website. She was particularly interested in the Inner Core Project and wanted to participate in it.
So we made out an appointment at my Airbnb place during my stay in Auckland. Our agreement was, that she wanted to participate in the project, shooting in underwear and possibly do some nude shooting if we protected her identity in these pictures.
R. has been working as a professional model for 15 years and she exuded both, curiosity in something new that she was keen to try out and extreme experience and professionalism in her work.
So we did Inner Core. And she surprised and baffled me because her approach was completely different from anything I had experienced with Inner Core shootings before. She just posed. She did her usual model routine and let me shoot this with long exposure. And as one of my core principles with the project is, not to interfere with my collaborators, I just followed her with my camera.
What we developed then was a lovely playful way of trying things out and playing with props and poses. She was intested in trying Inner Core in the nude and we started using fabrics, props like a chair, a kettle, a Boom Box.
Nude with Boom Box, face palming
I eventually suggested to her to slow down her model routine and to focus on how she felt and how she wanted to express herself. That surprised and baffled her in return because I was breaking up her routine (and I did not adhere to my principle of non-interference).
R., Inner Core Image
So we animated each other during the shooting process and it became a creative and real fun experience for both of us.
The outcome were all in all 12 series of long exposure motion blur pictures and also 2 series of portrait pictures that I shot with the “big camera”, the Nikon D850 with the 85mm portrait lens.
The problem when starting to edit the picture became obvious very quickly. It will be very difficult to maintain my model’s anonymity in the resulting pictures because we created a wild mix of blurred and non blurred nude and non nude pictures.
I love the outcome of this photo shoot. It is as wild and creative (and fun) as the whole shooting was. I will need to ask R. how she wants to handle the resulting pictures. The Inner Core pictures will be no problem I guess as they are blurred and don’t disclose the identity of my model. But what about the others? I will discuss this with her and we will see…