Niña, A Feisty Filipina

She put on some angry tunes and told me of her youthful indiscretions...

One thing that I’m acutely conscious of as I create this crazy Naked Prose project is the importance of establishing a coherent, consistent artistic style. I’m sure a social media manager would tell me that I need to be cultivating a brand, but that’s a bit more corporate than I’m willing to countenance at the moment. I need a vision, a calling card, a hallmark, a voice.

I’m sure that my photos, like any serious photographer’s, will have a look. I have my own particular way of selecting and framing my shots and, I like to think, a consistent post processing workflow that should result in some durable cohesion from shoot to shoot. I make conscious decisions that contribute to this, like only shooting with available (i.e. natural) light, not using reflectors (if only because I don’t have an assistant), and primarily shooting artistic nude poses from start to finish.

These decisions, however, put artificial limitations on what I can do creatively within the small time and space of a model shoot. They’re also things that I can change at any moment, since I’m the one who has set up these constraints in the first place.

Today’s shoot with model Niña (from the Philippines, number two if you’re scoring at home) has got me ruminating on all of this more than usual. Really it was just another model shoot in a tiny Hong Kong hotel room – I’ve done half a dozen of these already – but I am wary of falling into predictable patterns and, ultimately, getting stuck in a creative rut. I mean, there’s only so much I can do with natural light and 250 square feet of space.

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 Niña, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.