Attree Images

On the 26th to the 28th of Feb, the Qld division of the AIPP (Australian Institute of Professional Photography) had their big annual event called Hair of the Dog - http://www.hotd.qaipp.com.au/ This year, I was invited to speak about my Artistic Nude work and do a live studio shoot. 

It was a real pleasure to be invited and while I'm not a natural public speaker by any means, I do enjoy sharing my images and talking about my photography. I've gained so much from my involvement with the AIPP over the years, it was great to be able to give something back and hopefully the people that attended my session got something worthwhile from it.

My model for the day was the lovely Melita -http://www.modelmayhem.com/1193014 who did a great job standing stark naked in front of about 80 strangers throughout the day.

For the lighting demonstration, I started with a fairly basic lighting setup using one Bowens Gemini 750 head and a Redwing 140x100cm softbox. A small amount of fill light was added with the use of a reflector. 

I talked about starting an artistic nude shoot with a "shy nude" pose to help the model gain some confidence by giving her some material or clothing to partly cover herself up with then gradually moving to a completely nude pose.

I then moved to my favourite lighting setup for art nudes which involves two Bowens heads, each with Redwing 140x35cm strip softboxes attached. These strip softboxes, as the name suggests, give out a narrow strip of light which highlights the shape and form of the body while leaving a shadowed area on the camera side of the body. See the lighting diagram below to see where the two lights are placed in relation to the subject and camera. 

This set up is very good for keeping your image more modest even with a full frontal image by hiding areas in shadow. 

For the last setup I went back to a single Bowens Gemini 750 head mounted on a boom, placed above and aimed down at Melita's head. Attached to the Bowens head was a Bowens 75 degree Softlite Reflector which had a grid diffuser attached on the front of it. The Grid Diffuser for Softlite gives a pool of direct light in the centre surrounded by soft-diffused light - ideal for portrait and fashion applications. 

For the final image, I wanted to get even more creative so I decided to use the Nikon 45mm f2.8 Micro PC-E lens to get some narrow depth of field tilt / shift effect. As I was shooting with an aperture of f11 and even by reducing the output of the flash to it's minimum, I still had too much depth of field for the effect I was after. Since my Nikon D3s has such amazing high ISO performance with very low noise, I decided to use the modelling light from the Bowens as my only source of light and set the ISO to 6400 and the aperture to f2.8. This now gave me a shutter speed I was comfortable to hand hold and a shallow depth of field which really enhanced the tilt / shift effect I was looking for. 

The images were edited using Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro to give me the warm tone I prefer for my artistic nude images. In the final image, I pulled the opacity of the Silver Efex Pro layer back in Photoshop to reveal some of the original colour image below.