monochromephotography

Healing.Pulse.Sohbet – 2

The late winter afternoon photoshoot under a dim Sun continued with I and Elena attempting to experiment and take full advantage of the natural setting of Wienerberg Park. We walked around amongst the dead foliage, broken twigs, felled tree trunks and the skeleton-like woods. We tried a combination of headshots, chest level, waist level and some full-body portrait shots. I found myself gaining confidence and even being able to guide her before composing a shot. Elena’s occasional tip, not only for our ongoing shoot but also on the theories and philosophies behind photography, proved vital in this shoot. Also, she provided me with some million-dollar post-production tips, which worked wonders in the actual post-production process later.

Harmonising with Elena’s belief in nature’s healing power and the pulse of life that emanates from it, I tried to integrate the natural elements around us. I followed her playful body movements and made sure that I got enough sunlight just on the right spot of her facial profile. Her jewellery accessories and the twigs and grass combined to make a beautiful collage, thereby creating wondrous stories through the snapshots.

The shoot with Elena was not only a fun-filled portrait model shoot, but it was a seminal learning experience for my photographic journey. It was not merely a dialogue that I shared with her in the shoot but more like a Sohbet-an enlightened discourse. The Sohbet, captured in my lens, pulsated the healing power of Mother Nature even in the middle of a dry winter landscape.

Roobaroo

The golden hour sun was shining bright after a fresh spell of summer rains. I was in the middle of a photoshoot with Marios when I noticed a big clear puddle.

Roobaroo July 2020

When I asked Marios to stand over it, I noticed that the reflection acted more than a mirror. It felt like he was face to face-Roobaroo- with his self.

Elegance On The Rocks

My model, NX, was an enthusiastic young and ambitious actress. She was confident and thorough in her interactions with the camera. She displayed an unusual calm and elegance during the shoot and was sure that she would move her body to get the perfect shot.

Elegance On The Rocks June 2020

My work, as the photographer, became relatively easy owed to NX’s expertise. However, a rainy early summer afternoon by the Danube made it harder to shoot. The incessant drizzling and my good for nothing umbrella tested my patience and my shooting skills with practically one hand.  

In this photograph, I asked her to lie down on one of the big rocks on the Danube banks and arch backwards while looking directly at the lens. This was one of the perfect shots of the day-I had the right aperture settings; I got the right frame and to top it off , my model had an elegant pose on the rocks in her beautiful reptile print one-piece bikini.

The Boudoir Debut

My first boudoir photo-shoot began with a lot of nervousness, self-doubt and creative blocks. For the first quarter of an hour I had no clue what I was doing. I was rushing all the theories on monochrome boudoir in my mind that I had ever read; and I was asking my model, LM, to copy poses from photographs I randomly recalled from memory.

Gradually after about a dozen shots, I decided to go back to the basics of composition, light and shade dynamics and the classical techniques of figure drawing. Coupled with selective improvisation to the specific conditions of the location, I applied these very basic understandings of the human body, to create an ample collection of boudoir/noir nude photographs.

I followed the natural reactions of my model to the lens for the rest of the hour and tried to capture her raw expressions with very little guidance and manipulations. By putting extra emphasis on the series of points of interaction between the sunlight and the shadows on my model’s body (including in the post-production), I was able to overcome the technical and conceptual barriers of composition, controlling the light and posing my model to produce the following collection. What started out as a nervous experiment finished as an expressive and confident series of boudoir photographs.

Healing.Pulse.Sohbet – 1

The late winter afternoon Sun was dim and grey when I got off the tram in a southern Viennese neighbourhood for my first ever portrait photoshoot. I pulled up my jacket’s chain and started walking through a quaint street at whose end I met up with my friend and model for the day, Elena, in a lovely, cosy garden house. Elena and I had discussed my passion for photography earlier, and she sympathised with my hardships in navigating the photography industry in a foreign land. We started walking towards a big park with a lake which was a short distance away. I was quite nervous as I had no prior experience of a semi-professional shoot where one needs to guide the model and create a dialogue with them. My only respite was that Elena had an academic and professional background in filmography and photography and that I could bank upon her to pull me out of a problematic artistic or technical roadblock.

A strong wind had picked up by the time we started taking the first test shots on the edge of the lake on my brand new Nikkor 50mm 1.8G lens. It complicated my compositions and made it challenging to come up with meaningful results. The first few shots felt like those taken on point and shoots. However, after a shaky start, I could concentrate on my compositions, improving them significantly.

We took some shots by the lake with some trees in the background and then proceeded to other wooded areas in the park. The Sun was a bit brighter now, and Elena’s light beige coat gave the perfect complementary touch to the close-ups I took. I took a few snaps where I let the sunlight beam on to her face, while the rest of the frame was wrapped in the shade from the woods. These shots were one of the highlights of the day. We moved to another part of the park where Elena posed without the coat, in her sweater and pants and, we made the shoot a bit more edgy and experimental.

The photoshoot continues here…