Tuesday 29 July 2008

Desolation


Hasselblad 500cm with f4, 50mm lens, Agfapan 400 film

Wow today has been the coldest of our winter so far. A great day to run out of gas. So how come the outback photographer is posting a fine art nude today of all days. The answer is really simple... I wanted to.

This shot was taken a few years ago, just for fun and as part of a private project which is entitled "The Naked Landscape". Simple concept really, take a naked human and add them to a landscape urban or natural, try and get interesting images using just available light and the environment for inspiration. Funny thing is though, when I find a great location that I really want to shoot, there isn't a model anywhere to be found. By the time I find a model willing to get their kit off way out in the middle of the Never Never, the location has change, or the light no longer works there because of seasonal changes. On the other hand when you have a willing and able model or models, inspiration and locations seem to be hard to find.

What should have been a 12 month project has dragged on and on, but when our weather warms up I'm going to get right into it. That's my mid winter resolution. Well the New Years resolutions I make never happen so we'll try Mid Winter instead.

Our model Rachael was brave enough, or maybe she is just plain adventurous by nature and allowed me to drag her out into the middle of absolutely no where for the above shot. She wasn't fazed by the old derelict car body riddled with high caliber bullet holes. The chill of cold steel should have put her off, as I'm fairly sure that naked flesh pressed against cold, rusty, paint peeling steel, couldn't be all that pleasant but no she took it all in her stride.

The only interruption to the shoot was a bus load of Japanese tourists who drove up an old dirt road just behind the car. That event saw Rachael taking cover behind our bullet riddled car body and left me standing out in the centre of a million acre paddock trying t look as if I'm casually snapping pics of said car. Had they only looked closer!

Now people turning up on location isn't unusual, I've had a mother bring her three young teenage girls to look at a hot air balloon that I was shooting. Problem was, by the time I spotted her coming, I only had seconds to organize a diversion to steer her and attached children around to the other side of our partially inflated balloon. Right away from the five very naked men who were the subjects of the shot. Knowing the lady in question as I do, I'm reasonably confident we would have had to brush up on our CPR skills. But back to the bus load of tourists. I mentioned earlier that we were in the absolute middle of no where. Black Stump 500K's South, back of Burke 800K's North and no place between. How do these people manage to arrive on set on time?


No comments: