Follow The Bouncing Ball

Sometimes a space that you rent to shoot in comes with some unexpected and fun props. Here it was a “workout” ball; I’m sure they have an actual name, but that’s not my area of knowledge, working out an whatnot. When Devi saw it sitting off in the corner of this room she was immediately drawn to it, so we shot a roll of Portra 800 on it and this what we got.

It’s always fun when people I work with take the job of modeling serious, but can also be a little unserious and get creative.

A Baby Rant…

As you may or may not know, one thing I strive to do is to build a crew of people who enjoy working with me as much as I enjoy working with them. Devi is one of the first three people in my crew. Because I’m a broke photographer who scraps my money together to make sure I get all of this art created, I don’t shoot with Devi as much as I would like to. But over the past four years, we’ve managed to make one shoot happen per year. This is from our third shoot in August of 2021.

This is another one of those “fresh back from surgery” shoots. I had a little bit of money saved up from not being able to spend any of it for the last four months and a new Nikon Z5 that I had only shot three times before this shoot (even those these photographs were taken with the Hasselblad), so I splurged a little on the money and booked a nice spot for us to shoot in.

I never go into a shoot with Devi with a idea. At most I’ll have one or two pieces of wardrobe, as I did this day. We typically just assess the space we’re in and what clothing we have available to us, if any (there were none in our very first shoot), and just start freestyling it. And that’s why she’s in my “crew”. I’m really not an ideas guy when it comes to creating these images. Every now and then I have an idea that I really like and want to execute, like my mask series and paint series; neither of them are unique ideas exclusive to me, but the way I approach them make them a bit unique.

Freestyling shoots are fun to me because it ends up being a bit of both of us, the model and myself, creating rather than me coming in a telling the model to “give me this”. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you have a specific image in your head. But for me, I usually don’t. There may be a theme, but rarely often to i call someone up for a shot. I’m down to book a model for a two hour shoot and spend the first hour just talking with them while we both get a feel for what we’re doing. Those shoots usually get the best results. And if it’s not our first shoot together, we’ve already been through that process, so we’re only talking for about 15 minutes before we get into the groove of the day. It always feels like an odd way to work with some people, but if they’ve noticed it I’m sure they’ve realized that the photographs that came from shoots like that, whether it is with me or another photographer, turn out better than on other shoots.

That was just a little talk/rant because I haven’t been here to talk to you all in a while. I hope you enjoy the photographs of Devi. Show her some love. Support her things. And don’t be weird.