Merylin, My First Three-peat

For our third meeting, I gifted us some actual space to work in.

When I started doing this whole business of shooting art-nude photos (and trying to make a whole business out of it), I was aware that there were lots of things I didn’t know. One thing I didn’t know that I didn’t know (as Donald Rumsfeld might say) was how crucial a handful of Ukrainian women would be in filling the first year of my shooting calendar. A full third of my shoots thus far have been with models hailing from that beleaguered would-be NATO ally.

Today’s shoot is with Merylin, my first three-time art-nude collaborator. If you’ve been following my work, you’ll have noticed that I like to mix things up a bit when I work with a model for subsequent shoots; one of my go-to methods for doing that is just to shoot part or all of the session on film. In fact that’s what I did with Merylin the last time we worked together. You may be thinking, then, that for our third shoot, I’m going to go to NASA’s STScI control center and shoot her with the James Webb telescope, or some other such absurdity.

Happily, I have learned not to push my luck quite that far. Our first two shoots were in hotel rooms (the default in this business), so for this third occasion I felt it was change enough to book a studio space to work in. No film, no weird gimmicks or arbitrary self-imposed restrictions, just a change of scenery. That decision wasn’t necessarily without its challenges, but it was decidedly less masochistic.

The only problem, really, was that the green studio room I booked was a bit on the dim side for my liking. Quite a bit better than the red room I used with Niana, but not nearly as bright as some of the other studios I’ve used. I love all of the earth tones and wood textures, but this space eats up more light than it gives back. The greenhouse area seemed to be an exception, so that’s where Merylin and I began.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Merylin, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.