Stephanie, At Home and in a Cornfield

In this business you need to be ready for anything, and Stephanie was definitely something.

I had been looking forward to working with Stephanie, this week’s featured model, for several months when I finally stepped through the door of her beautiful home. She welcomed me with a warm and bubbly loquaciousness that never flagged as we spent the next two hours or so getting to work on the images you’ll see here. She also gave me some coffee, which was even more appreciated than her smile given our late morning start time.

As I busied myself with unpacking and assembling my chosen camera gear for the day (the usual – two OM bodies and the f/1.7 zooms with Glimmerglass filters), she wanted to know my astrological sign. This shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was; she does, after all, feature her star sign quite prominently in her social media accounts. I just hadn’t really noticed, because I have never been even the slightest bit interested in astrology. This is Stephanie: unapologetically and confidently herself in all moments. (We’re both Virgos, by the way.)

She gave me the photography-relevant tour of her house, which is extensive. Three floors, each with at least one room or area to explore creatively. The place is overflowing with natural textures and good old-fashioned American character. The building itself is quite aged (by American standards, anyway), and the décor befits the rustic, rural landscape in which it sits: a forest’s worth of wood, well-worn with a patina of use. It’s also a hot, sweaty place on this late July morning.

We began downstairs in the dining room and kitchen, with Stephanie leading the way after a quick initial chat about what I expected from the shoot. Not only is she my first American model, she’s also the first one for whom erotica was expressly included in the agreement. (So, if you’d like to see more of Stephanie, wink wink, become a paying subscriber for access to the whole shoot at the end of this post.)

I’m not nearly as interested in shooting erotica as art nude, but she was there and willing, and there’s an audience for it, as she reminded me, so she worked her poses from unassuming to unabashed in each location. Erotica won’t ever be the focus of Naked Prose, but I’ll dabble a bit when the opportunity arises with certain models who are experienced and confident with the style.

Stephanie correctly gleaned from my portfolio that I’m primarily (almost exclusively) a natural light shooter. We both then noticed that I was going to have my work cut out for me. The only usable light came through the house’s windows, which it obviously has many of, but it was a completely cloudy late morning, and there’s a sizable tree shading much of the front of the house, so the light I had to work with was rather weak in most places. Complicating things further, the windows were generally without covering – large squares of unattenuated daylight that Stephanie had to sidle up to. I also managed to forget my little foldable white balance target, so I had to fashion a makeshift stand-in out of a piece of A4 paper. Very professional.

The sum of all of these parts is a shoot that is simultaneously quite varied and rather one-note. The range of different locations in the house gives the images plenty of visual variety; in fact we didn’t make use of every possible nook and cranny (sometimes we were competing with her two dogs for indoor real estate). Much of the time, though, we were working with a piece of furniture directly next to a large uncovered window. There’s some moodiness in the contrast that kind of light creates, and Stephanie of course did well to find the best light and looks for herself. The shoot definitely had a coherence and consistency given the scenes that were on offer.

That is, of course, until we ended up in the cornfield.

We were in the attic (having gradually worked our way upwards from the ground floor), approaching what felt like a natural conclusion to the day’s work. I was already a sweaty mess from standing, kneeling, bracing, raising and lowering a camera, all in an inadequately fan-cooled third story, and I could have called it a day. Stephanie, ever the professional, suggested a change of scenery.

There’s a cornfield (sprawling, as they tend to be in this part of the country) just in front of the house. It’s not her cornfield, mind you, and she has neighbors within reasonable peeping distance, so we had to navigate our way a couple rows deep into the vegetation for privacy assurance. It was hot, buggy, itchy, muddy – not qualities I actively seek in this line of work, so we were only out there for a few minutes. But hey! Stephanie, naked in a cornfield. Maybe that’s what you needed today.

A fittingly quirky end to a thoroughly enjoyable shoot with an endlessly entertaining model. Hopefully I’ll be able to work with her again next summer – who knows where we’ll end up next time…