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.

I surveyed the creative landscape while Niña touched up her makeup. Lighting situation was the usual – one fairly large window with options for sheer or no curtain. The bed, the easiest place to shoot, was large, flanked with minimal distractions, and topped with bright white linens (all positives); there was a tall mirror in the hallway that looked to have workable light; a built-in desk surface protruded out from the bottom of the large window, plenty bright but heavily back-lit.

As I work through these professional shoots, I try to learn something that I can carry forward to make every subsequent one better. Today’s revelation was to enable the histogram in the viewfinder and crank up exposure compensation to, as we say in the biz, ETTR (“expose to the right”). Revelation is a strong word – I already knew all of this, but I hadn’t been consciously doing it during these shoots, and I routinely had to bump the exposure of my images a full stop or more in Lightroom. (I don’t know why my camera’s light meter gives me an exposure calculation that leaves that much headroom, but I’m sure it’s because I’m metering like an idiot.)

In my defense, the reason that the histogram isn’t visible in the viewfinder most of the time is because I prefer to have the digital level enabled so I can keep my vertical and horizontal lines as straight as possible. For some reason, my OM cameras (in their default state, anyway) only allow the histogram or the level to be displayed at a time. Hopefully I can dig into the customization and enable both at once, because I find them both indispensable.

Anyway, having that extra bit of exposure compensation gives me much cleaner and brighter RAW files to work with in post, so there’s much less work to do at home. This is especially important for smaller sensors that get noisy quickly at high ISO or underexposure, so let this be a reminder to us all to nail those exposures at the point of capture.

But what about Niña? She was easy to work with and entertaining to talk to. (When I know I can’t spend two whole hours shooting on location, I tend to fill the time chatting with the model. They’re always interesting people, nor was Niña by any means an exception.) In the leadup to our session she also gave me an update on her current hairstyle (the red streaky ‘do she’s rocking here) and to make sure that I knew she had tattoos. This is something several models have been proactive about; apparently many photographers aren’t big fans of tattooed models. I can understand that; I’ll admit that I find tattoos in general (and small, random ones in particular) to be quite distracting rather than complementary to a nude female figure, but if I passed on working with tattooed models, this website wouldn’t last more than another couple weeks. And they’re not all bad - I’ve seen some on models that have been quite striking, and they make for easy conversation topics to break up the action during a shoot. So in keeping with my general ethos of working with models as they are, I was happy to roll with (and even feature) Niña’s personal touches.

She warned me about her taste in music before she queued up a playlist on her phone. I dared her to do her worst, so we worked amidst a cacophony of frantic punk/metal tracks of varying intensities. I say cacophony, but I’m an unapologetic metalhead myself, and to be honest I can’t consciously process the music while I’m concentrating on all the complicated business of capturing the images. My only practical concern with a model’s music preferences, in fact, is the volume, for the audible cue of the camera shutter is a sort of metronome to keep the shoot moving forward apace. Mirrorless cameras have rather anemic mechanical shutters, unlike their burly SLR predecessors, whose weighty mirror assemblies always produce a satisfying, unapologetic thwack.

And so we posed, clicked, headbanged, and chatted our way through the session. Though it was a rather limited location, I think we got a decent variety of looks. Hopefully I’ve done her justice, and her personality has come through a bit. For best results, flip through the images in this one to a playlist of your favorite up-tempo shouty tracks.