I visit the state of Nevada now and then to visit family there, and over the years, I’ve gone out into the Nevada desert to photograph art nudes numerous times. However, it had been a few years since the last time that I had done so.
A few months ago, I read that the model Katie Marie would be making a trip to Las Vegas for a few days, and as I liked the portfolio that she had posted online and I was planning to make a trip there, I decided to get in touch with her to try to arrange a photo session during my Nevada visit last week.
Thankfully, Katie did indeed reply and we were able to organize a photo session for an early morning one day. I’ll be honest with all of you. I had to ask myself if I really wanted to get up at 4:00 in the morning to drive out into the desert to make some photos, but I’m glad that I did. Katie was wonderful to work with, in addition to being a great model who didn’t require much direction. When I did offer some direction, she responded very well.
This turned out to be one of the best photo sessions I’ve had in a while, resulting in a lot of good images. It was a difficult choice, but here are some of them.
Looking forward, I definitely hope to work with Katie again.
As I may have written about previously, since my retirement from work last autumn, I have tried to use the time newly available to me to do some things that I have wanted to do but never have. Some things can be done any time or at regular intervals, such as my first trip to Cuba in December or my first trip to Venice during the Carnevale two months ago.
Some things happen unexpectedly, such as the earthquake that I felt and experienced here in New York City just last week. (Well, I may not have wanted to be in the middle of an earthquake, but it is something notable that I never experienced before.)
Then there are those things can be known about in advance, but are rare in their occurrences. A total solar eclipse of the sun, when the moon passes in front of the sun to fully obscure it, is something that has fascinated me for a long time, as I have been interested in astronomy since I was young, but I have never been able to see one – until this week. After the last total eclipse in the United States in 2017, it was widely announced that the next one would happen in 2024 on April 8 (which, by coincidence, just happens to be my birthday).
Another coincidence is that my good friend and fellow photographer Dave Levingston just happens to live in the path of totality of this year’s eclipse, in Ohio, and he very kindly invited me to come over to stay with him to experience the eclipse with his family and friends.
One of the questions that I asked myself was this: should I or should I not try to photograph the event? Of course, as I am a photographer, the obvious answer should be “yes,” but if one is busy photographing, a person can actually miss properly seeing and experiencing the event. (I think of the photo of the Pope in Boston riding along in his Popemobile, with everyone in the crowd trying to take photos with their phones, except for one woman, who is actually enjoying seeing him, with a big smile on her face.)
Another factor was that I would have to buy a somewhat expensive eclipse filter for my lens, so I eventually decided that I would just try to photograph the totality, when the sun is completely obscured by the moon and a filter is not required. Then I decided to buy a set of eclipse glasses that also included a set of two eclipse filters to use with a cell phone, so I decided to try to photograph the partial eclipse phase with my phone, prior to using my Fujifilm X-H2S for the totality.
Well, that seemed like a good plan – in theory, anyway. In practice, it didn’t work quite as well. When I tried to make some photos with the filter on my camera, the photos were so overexposed that it didn’t even look like the sun was partially covered by the moon. Then I tried to use the two filters together, and the results were too dark, so either way, it wasn’t working.
At that point, however, I had already set up the Fuji camera on my tripod in preparation for the totality, so I decided to try something else – I found some tape and I taped one of the mobile phone filters to the front of the Fuji lens – and it worked. I wasn’t sure if the filter would be large enough to cover enough of the lens, but it was, and using the screen on the back of the Fuji, I was able to find the sun and the moon above. One problem persisted, however – the image was very overexposed, due to so much dark space being in the frame – but I managed to bring the exposure down to normal by setting the camera to underexpose the image by four or five stops.
By the time I did this, the moon had already covered up most of the sun, so I began my photos with a slim crescent of the sun to be seen. Slowly, that crescent became thinner and thinner, then smaller and smaller. Finally, as the crescent was about to disappear altogether…………wham!!! There, up in the sky above, was the black sphere of the moon surrounded by the white corona of the sun, all set against the blackness of space! Down below on terra firma, day had turned to night – not the full blackness of midnight, but a dark twilight, I would say.
At that point, I removed the filter from the lens, but the image was still overexposed due to the overwhelming darkness (and the camera trying to render the scene as average gray), so I had to again adjust the exposure to minus five stops. I kept pushing the button on the Fuji every few seconds to try record any variations of the scene, but I also just kept looking up marveling at what I was seeing. As humans, I like to think that we process things on both an intellectual and an emotional level. On the intellectual side, I had seen photos of this type of thing before, so I knew that it happened, but emotionally, I think that I needed to finally see it with my own two eyes to truly believe that such a magnificent display was possible.
According to the metadata from my photos, the totality lasted for about two minutes and 20 seconds. Eventually, the “diamond ring” effect came into being as the moon began to move beyond the sun, and that was quickly followed by the return of a small, slivery crescent of the sun, which began to grow as the moon and sun continued to part ways. I guess that watching the sun grow larger is somewhat anti-climactic, especially following the totality, and all of the people around me eventually went back inside, but I remained outside to continue photographing. The entire eclipse, from start to finish, lasted a little over two and a half hours.
The photographs I’m posting here (other than the one at the top) are therefore showing the initial crescent of sun, followed by the totality, followed by photos of the moon moving away from the sun. During the partial phase, the sun could be seen with its typical orange color, but during the totality, the corona surrounding the sun was white, though some specks of orange – solar prominences, perhaps? – could be seen. However, for the sake of uniformity, I am showing all of the photos in black & white.
Was it worth a trip to Ohio to witness the eclipse? Absolutely. Some people traveled a lot further than I did to see this event (and being able to spend my birthday with good friends made it even more worthwhile). The next question is: now that I have seen one eclipse and have checked off that box, will I try to see more? Strangely enough, even though I have the photographic proof, I have kept asking myself the question, “Did you really see what you think you saw?”
Well, I am certainly considering it, and I can understand why people become “umbraphiles” and chase after eclipses. There will be none next year, but there will be one to be visible in totality across western Iceland and northern Spain in August 2026, and another one across northern Africa, including Egypt, in August 2027.
For those of you who have never seen a total eclipse, it is something worth traveling to see. While a partial eclipse is also worth seeing, one really needs to see a total eclipse to get the full effect. The full eclipse from start to finish may take a few hours, but the totality lasts just a few minutes. Still, in those precious few minutes, one can truly experience the power of nature and the wonders of the universe.
Last month, I began making posts about my recent trip to Venice, Italy. I began with a post (here) about the famous Carnevale that takes place there every year now, leading up to the beginning of the Christian period of Lent on Ash Wednesday. (In fact, the name Carnevale basically means “farewell to meat.”)
Many people from around the world come to Venice to celebrate. The ones who take it seriously get dressed in elaborate costumes from years past, many wearing masks. Some people who aren’t serious but want to take part just wear inexpensive masks that they buy locally (and there are definitely plenty to buy there). Then there are those who wear costumes that are, shall I say, unique.
Of course, there also those who participate in other ways or just come to watch.
Here, now, are some more photos of people celebrating the Carnevale.
I returned home from Mexico last week after attending a photographic event in the state of Quintana Roo, organized by Create With Sirens, with models Astrid Kallsen and Meghan Claire. The primary purpose of the event was to photograph models underwater.
As I wrote in earlier post, I made my first attempt to photograph models underwater at a cenote (a kind of “swimming hole,” as some may say) on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula last year. I had a major problem to deal with then: I was unable to both swim and handle my camera at the same time, as both required the use of my arms and hands. In order to get some photos, I ended up sitting on a large rock at the edge of the cenote, partially in the water, and from there I held the camera underwater and framed the image by looking at the screen on the back of the camera, which I was able to see through the transparent, inexpensive housing.
This time around, I was advised to get some fins to wear on my feet, and they worked. With the fins, I was able to better use my feet to propel myself, leaving my hands free to use the camera, and I was thus able to actually get into the water for the first time.
While that was a great step forward, I still had two major problems to deal with. One was technical difficulties with the camera and the housing. On the first day, it was so bright out that I couldn’t really see the screen on the back of the camera, so I had to basically aim the camera in the general direction of where the models were. (This was not a problem last year, as the cenote where I photographed was essentially underground, so the surroundings were dark and allowed me to see the camera screen.)
Another problem that I have with my underwater housing is that the camera controls seem to have a mind of their own and set themselves to things that I never knowingly set them to. For example, I set the electronic viewfinder to display in black & white, but suddenly it changed from that to color, and then later it got set to sepia, and I have no idea why, other than my handling the housing having accidentally changed the settings (which, of course, I was not able to do willingly). One time I saw the menu came up to the “Format” setting, so I totally let go for fear of erasing the entire media card.
After I reviewed my photos from the second day, when I was able to see the screen and viewfinder to frame the images, I saw that most of my photos were too blurry, and when I looked at the metadata for the photos, I understood why: almost all of the photos were made with a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/50 second, which was too slow to freeze the action – and I have absolutely no idea how it got set that way.
On the third and final day, I had set the shutter speed to a maximum of 1/250 of a second, and that seemed to solve that problem, but I also had to deal with exposure problems in both low and bright light.
I am planning to get a new housing which should permit me to see and handle the camera better, but there is one problem I need to deal with that is not technically related: getting under water. Even though I had a mask and a snorkel, I have always had a problem getting underwater and staying there for a while, so for the most part, my camera was below the water but my head was above it – which is exactly how I did it last year. What I need to do now is to work on getting underwater and trying to stay there. At the very least, I have to practice with the snorkel to at least keep my face in the water (which should solve the problem of not being able to see the screen on a bright day, as both my eyes and the screen would be under water).
Overall, this event pushed me more to try something new and different than any other event has done in a very long time. Despite all of the difficulties that I had (which the other participants did not have), I’m glad I went. The technical difficulties could have resulted in a total disaster, but somehow, I think I managed to come back with some good photographs, some of which you can see here.
Next time, hopefully, the results will be even better.
I made a post recently showing some of the photographs that I made during the recent Carnevale in Venice, Italy. I have many more of those photos to show, and I plan to post some of them here in the future.
As it was, Carnevale is a time when Venice – or should I say, parts of Venice – could get very crowded. Much of the activity of people dressed up – wearing fanciful outfits and masks, fanciful outfits without masks or people casually dressed and wearing masks – took place in and around Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square). Such people could also be seen walking around in other areas. On weekend days, some streets, many of which are only just a few feet wide, were so crowded that foot traffic moved at a crawl with a single file in each direction.
However, not all of Venice was like that. Walk away from the central areas and you could still have the street all to yourself. Not only that, but such places are quiet, due to Venice having no automotive traffic. Some streets terminate at a canal, and it’s not unusual to stand there looking at the water only to have a gondola silently glide by.
I even took a walk to a section of Venice called Sant’Elena that is far to the east of Piazza San Marco, and as I walked there as the sky grew dark and evening approached, I found myself in some places that were so quiet that I could almost hear a proverbial pin drop.
So, while I will return later to the revelry and pageantry of Carnevale, here are some photographs that show another side of the city. In days past, Venice was called “La Serenissima” – the Most Serene Republic – and in these parts of the city, Venice remains serene.
I wrote in my last blog post how my having retired from work last year gave me the chance to go finally go to Cuba. I’ve decided to make this post about that.
Cuba is one of the countries located closest to the United States, and it appears to be an interesting place to visit, but because of the US government’s continued economic embargo (which is a whole other story altogether), it can seem like a difficult place to visit. However, one of my old time photo instructors, Steve Anchell, has held a workshop to photograph nudes there annually for quite some time.
The problem with this in the past was that it’s held in early December, which was the busiest time of the year at work for me, so I couldn’t get away. Having retired at the end of September, that was no longer a problem last year, so I decided to go. I even convinced my friend Dave Levingston to go with me – and that brings up a tale which I would like to tell.
Dave and I traveled to Cuba on the same day but on different airlines – I with American and he with Southwest. My flight was scheduled to arrive about half an hour before his, so we hatched two plans: Plan A would have me waiting for him in the terminal before going through immigration, and Plan B would have me waiting outside the terminal for him. When I arrived, I saw that I couldn’t wait inside, so I proceeded through immigration and passport control (which was no problem) and then had my bags x-rayed before leaving the airport (as some countries require people to do).
I decided that it would be best to wait for Dave just beyond the x-ray point as I could see everyone coming through. As he has a long beard, I thought he would be easy to spot, but after waiting for much more than half an hour, there was no sign of him. Finally, a woman working at the airport who had seen me waiting came to me, told me that she spoke English and asked if she could help me. I told her that I was waiting for a friend who was flying on Southwest, and she told me this: that Southwest arrives at another terminal – Terminal 2. (I was at Terminal 3, I believe.)
So, in all of our planning on how to meet, not once did either of us consider that our two flights might arrive at different terminals – and unlike many airports where the terminals are close together, the woman told me that Terminal 2 was about two kilometers away from where I was. She then looked at her watch and told me that if I hurried, I could catch a bus to Terminal 2, so I hurried out, passed through Customs, went outside and saw a bus waiting. In my best Spanish, I asked if the bus was going to Terminal 2, and the driver said yes.
I got on the bus, camera backpack on my back and hauling my suitcase and carry-on bag up the steps, and found myself on a bus filled with people, in a strange country, and hopefully going where I wanted to go. I asked a man standing next to me if the bus was going to Terminal 2, and he was very helpful, telling me yes, and eventually told me where to get off.
The bus stop was still a bit of a walk to the terminal itself, and after a few minutes of dragging my stuff through the parking lot, I eventually arrived, and was greeted by a taxi driver who asked in English if he could help me. I told him that I was looking for a friend who had arrived via Southwest, so the driver, who was clean shaven, held his hands under his chin and pretended to be stroking a long beard. “Is your friend like this?” he asked me, and I said “Yes!!!,” to which he replied, “He took a taxi and left five minutes ago.”
“Oh, well,” I thought to myself. “I guess he just got tired of waiting for me and went to the hotel in Havana on his own,” so I asked the taxi driver to take me there. The drive took about half an hour, to a small hotel that the driver was not familiar with, and we eventually arrived to the hotel, located on a narrow street on the edge of old Havana.
I had expected to see Dave there already as he had a five minute start on me, but when I arrived, I found out that he hadn’t arrived yet. I wondered why, but about five or ten minutes later, a car pulled up and I saw him enter the hotel lobby. Thinking about or Plan A and Plan B, I was about to say to him “I guess we ended up with Plan C,” but he beat me to it and said something like “This was Plan Z!” The reason he arrived later than I did was that he had gone with his taxi to my terminal to look for me – so my bus and his taxi must have quite literally passed each other on the road as we went our ways.
As for the photo event itself, all of the models were local Cubans (unlike many photo events where the models are brought in from elsewhere), so that gave a certain amount of authenticity to what we were doing. Other than one outdoor location at a park, all of the locations were indoors, as it seems like Cuba is a place where it’s difficult to find outdoor locations to photograph nudes.
I’ve written enough already, so I think I’ll finish here. As for the photos, I’m including one photo of each of the models who I photographed. I’ll try show more in some future posts.
I don’t remember if I wrote this previously, but after being in the work force full time for over 37 years, I finally retired at the end of September last year. One of the results of this (and one of my reasons for doing it) is that I now have more time to travel than I did before, and the freedom to basically travel whenever I want.
This now gives me the chance to do some things that I have wanted to do but was unable to do before due to the demands of my job. One thing that I did was to make a trip to Cuba for the first time in December. (I still need to write about that.)
More recently, I just returned home last week from a two-week trip to Venice, Italy (or, as it’s called in Italian, Venezia). I had certainly been to Venice before – in 1990, 2009 and 2017 – so this was not my first trip there. However, it was my first time being there during the annual Carnevale – that time of fun and revelry held in the weeks before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, when people come to Venice to dress up in costumes, many with masks, to have a good time. Being in Venice to photograph the Carnevale was also on my “to do” list, so I’m glad that I was finally able to accomplish it.
So, what was it like? Well, in actuality, most people are not dressed up in fancy costumes. Some tourists may not even be aware that is it Carnevale. Some people do buy masks to wear, most of the kind that cover the upper part of the face. (I myself bought a full face mask that I wore some of the time, along with the traditional three corned hat, that scared a couple of kids, and scared one young woman from Slovenia, too.)
Of course, there were plenty of photographers around, but as I said to some people I met, I imagined that I was probably one of the few photographers there who was photographing in black & white.
I made lots of photographs – much more than I can include in one blog post – so here are half a dozen that I will show for now. Think of this as the first in a series, with more to follow.
Back in September, I made a post with photos that I made at night in London, at the beginning of my two-week trip to Great Britain in late August and early September. From London, I went to southwest England to spend a day photographing with a friend (which I will write about in another post). From there, I made the long journey north by train up to the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Grand Cafe, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2023
I had been to Edinburgh twice before, but the most recent visit was over 20 years ago. On this occasion, I once again enjoyed walking its fine streets and seeing its fine, stately buildings and parks. Here is a selection of some of the photos that I made there.
I had wanted to work with the English model Rebecca Perry for a while. I was impressed with the portfolio of work that she had done, and I finally decided to try to arrange something with her during the three week trip to Great Britain that I had planned for 2020. Unfortunately, we didn’t even get to the point of settling on a location for the photos, as the whole trip was short-circuited by Covid before we could get any further.
We kept in touch over the following years, and even had an online video chat, but finally we were able to reschedule during my trip to Britain in August of last year. We had made our plans early in the year, but a few months before my trip, she told me of a change in her situation – that she was now pregnant – and wanted to know if I still wanted to continue as planned. (This was a bit ironic, as she had joked during the intervening years that I had better photograph her before she got married and became pregnant.)
As for what I decided – well, since I’m making a post about my photo session with her, it’s pretty obvious that I went ahead with it. Certainly, it wasn’t what I expected when I arranged to photograph her, but I’m an art and portrait photographer, not someone who photographs glamour, so I decided that it’s just another facet of doing art nude photography. (I certainly can’t blame a model for wanting to have a family, either.)
Of course, I also wanted to finally meet Rebecca after having corresponded with her for so long. I’m glad that I did, and she was very pleasant to work with. The photos were made at a studio in England where I had worked previously in 2017, but it’s now under new ownership, so it’s filled with a lot more props and things than it was last time, when it was rather spare.
All in all, I think our photos turned out pretty well. In fact, we’re already planning to work together when I make my return to England this year.
I woke this morning and found some good news when I checked my messages: three of my photographs had earned Honorable Mentions in the 2023 Monochrome Awards in the nude/amateur category.
This was the first time that I had entered this competition, so it was a nice thing to wake up to. Looking back through my messages, I see that I made my entries back in July and had basically forgotten that I had done so, making today’s message an even greater surprise.
As for images, two of them are from my earlier days of photographing nudes. The earliest is “Nude, New Mexico,” which I made in 1998 at a ranch near the Rio Grande river. I had attended two workshops in Santa Fe that summer and this location was used, so when I stayed a few days extra to photograph some models on my own, I arranged to return here. For this image, made late in the day when the sun was low and casting shadows horizontally, the model was shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, and I told her to hold it there because it looked perfect.
The other oldie is the “Untitled Nude” from 1999. This one was made not in New Mexico, but in New Jersey. I was attending a group event with several models, and like the New Mexico photo, this one was also made late in the afternoon with the sun getting low. Unlike in New Mexico, when the sun was essentially behind me, here it was in front of me and behind the model, which gave her body a rim lit glow all around.
Finally, the third photo was made on my trip to Iceland in 2014. I had brought two models with me from New York, but I also worked with English model Rebecca Tun – in this case, at the Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon on the south coast. My plan was to just photograph Rebecca on the shore with the lagoon and the icebergs in the background behind her, but she said that she wanted to go in, so I told her that she could do so (but not do anything unreasonable).
Figures of Grace 