I have diversified somewhat. I’m not just shooting young women sans apparel. Not that I intend to stop doing that, but I’ve found it interesting to shoot people wearing clothes, too. I believe there are other photographers who do this a lot.

I have been shooting some “fashion-like” images. It’s funny; I don’t want to admit I’ve shot fashion, because I’ve always thought of it as shallow and ephemeral. Maybe I have to admit that I’m starting to see some of the attraction? Nah, that’s not going to happen. But I will admit that my resistance to shooting clothed images has fallen dramatically. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll call them fashion shots. Don’t count on it being this year, though.

One category I have found more rewarding than I expected is “mother and child”.  There’s a clear chemistry between a mother and child, and it comes through in photographs. It doesn’t matter what the ages of mother and child are. I intend to shoot a lot more mothers and children – not just because it produces good images, but because it feels good, too. Lots of positive feedback. It’s also easier than I expected. Perhaps people like being photographed with their mothers?

I haven’t limited my shooting of pairs to those related by blood, either. I’ve shot a few models with their boyfriends or husbands (not always with the foreknowledge of the boyfriend in question…). Some boyfriends/husbands accompany their girlfriends/wives as chaperone, and end up in an image or two. Not every time, but sometimes it can add a little extra to the shoot. The male in question can feel supportive without getting stuck holding reflectors. However, if you are male, and your significant other asks you to accompany them to a shoot, don’t panic – no one has ever been forced to pose.

So I’m shooting a wider variety. That’s good. I’m still shooting artistic nudes, and fully intend to keep doing so (don’t worry – I’ll be posting more nudes soon!). Writing about this made me think: what am I not shooting? Lots of things. I’m still focussing on people. People are interesting. No landscapes. No animals (well, no animals that I will post here. I still like to visit the zoo to try out new equipment from time to time). No still-lifes. No buildings.

Most notably, I’m still shooting in a studio – I don’t shoot outside. I like the control of the studio. Maybe next year…

PhotoShop has an array of filters that do strange things. I doubt I’ll even scratch the surface of the filters built into CS3, let alone indulge in the multitude of filters that are available for download, either for money or for free. That doesn’t mean I don’t play around sometimes. I had fun playing with the Emboss filter a while back. Doubt I’ll ever use it for real, but it does make some cute images. Maybe if I wanted to turn an image into a button for a windows interface of some kind.

 The one filter I use on every image is Sharpen – I generally use Smart Sharpen, because I prefer the results I get with it. Old-style PS users tend to stick to Unsharp Mask (never have understood why it’s called “un-sharp”, but that’s not important).

Anyway, I occasionally explore the Filters menu when I’m playing with PhotoShop. A few days ago I tried using the Find Edges filter on an image I’d converted to a semi-silhouette (I talked about semi-silhouettes a while back). The results surprised me. I got an image that looked to me exactly like it had been sketched using coloured pencils. Not necessarily the right coloured pencils, but coloured nonetheless. That is rather neat! If I converted the result to monochrome I could end up with a regular pencil sketch, but I like the coloured version. This is very exciting for someone who can’t sketch, but wants to. In the example semi-silhouette here I think it’s really interesting how the sketch shows the face as blank (because it was black in the original) – it looks as though the sketch is unfinished, as though the artist left off before sketching the face. That adds to the feeling of the image being a sketch, for me.

Having made this serendipitous discovery, I started trying it on other images. It rapidly became clear that my fondness for clean white (or black) backgrounds was a huge plus when using this technique, because it yielded a clean background – another thing that enhanced the feeling on this image being a sketch. Using the silhouette technique first isn’t a requirement (although it does produce strong edges, which doesn’t hurt). The next example isn’t a silhouette – it’s the same model, coated in olive oil (it’s good for the skin, apparently, as well as making her smell like Greek food – amusingly, we had treated ourselves to Greek tavern food before this shoot).

The background doesn’t have to be white – it can be black (I discussed the special features of white and black backgrounds another time). It is easy to make completely pure black and pure white backgrounds. That really helps when you want to produce these sketch-like images, because it means there are no edges in the background. If we use strong edge lighting we can get thick edges. This image was lit using two large slot softboxes, positioned left and right of the camera, at 90 degrees to the camera angle. This results in an image that looks like it was outlined with a blunt 6B pencil. I toned the edge down a little by using a large round brush painting pure white (another good reason to get a clean white background).

This is one of those effects you can over-use (although not as quickly as Emboss). I won’t process every image I take this way – that would be ridiculous. But it produces attractive results that mimic sketches. Suddenly I can make a kind of art I have never been able to make before, and that means a lot to me – hence this write-up.

 I think I’ll go play with some more of the filters in the PhotoShop menu…

A good implied nude can be more erotic than a bad “full” nude. I think of images as expressing a statement. A bad nude image says something like “me girl – see my girly bits!” – a neanderthal lack of subtlety. A good implied image says something like “I seem to have mislaid my clothes. If I were to move a bit you might see more than you would normally. What a pity you can’t see it here” – it is a tease. It’s the difference between hitting the viewer over the head with naked breasts (an interesting image – I must consider shooting that some time), and making them imagine what is hidden. I think that’s fundamental to a good implied nude – the image must be teasing the viewer. A good implied nude stimulates the imagination; it can also be more erotically stimulating – that’s not a bad thing. Indeed, one might argue that implied nudes are more about eroticism than artistic nudes – a really good artistic nude can desexualise the image to allow the viewer to concentrate on the shapes – that doesn’t happen in an implied nude. Hiding something draws the viewer’s mind to it; exposing it removes the mystery. 

There are lots of bad implied nude images – these are the ones I was referring on the covers of cheap magazines. Images of a woman covering her breasts with her hands – what are these saying? If she didn’t want to be photographed topless, why did she pose that way? The coyness feels so fake. The same thing applies, to a lesser extent, to images where she is holding a towel or sheet to her breasts. These shots lack imagination. They taint the whole genre.

I like bold implied nude images. Images that are only barely implied (pun not intended, but I like it!). Images that look, at first glance, as though they are revealing everything; look more closely, and you realise that the crucial areas are covered (even in the original high resolution image, nothing shows). Look at the dining chair image – the young lady in question is clearly nude, and not sitting in a discreet way, yet she is showing less than she might in a bikini (well, a high-cut bikini…). This is not a subtle image. Some might take exception to it, despite the fact that it is not explicit, but then some take exception to the whole idea of taking photographs of unclothed people – makes me wonder if they are objecting to being reminded of their own sexual nature? 

Now compare that image to the classic implied nude with the heart-shaped cushion. This is more like the common idea of implied nude imagery. There is nothing wrong with this image, and I like it, but I think it lacks the impact of the dining chair image. That gave me cause to ponder for a while. Is it that the cushion is an extraneous element? Could it be that the chair is standing symbolically for a person, and the pose suggests her body wrapped around her lover – most emphatically a sexual image? Or could it be as simple as the image showing her legs apart; her legs are demurely together in the heart image? Exploring the ramifications of that question is a topic for another day. 

I think we can extend the idea of the implied nude to images that show breasts – I’m just not sure what to call them. The young lady sitting cross-legged is an example. One reason I consider this an implied nude is because the pose suggests that the viewer might see more if the point of view were swung around the left. You might argue that this is what some refer to as “tasteful” nudes – I don’t like that term, because I think it is possible for an explicit nude to be tasteful – consider Michangelo’s David. I don’t like calling this “implied nude with breasts”, either. Perhaps we need to invent a new term for it? Something like “discreet nude”? I don’t see this as a purely artistic nude, because of the implied sexual nature of the image. There are artistic elements, such as the strong curve to her spine, and the deliberate echo of the red of her lipstick and the stool, but it cannot escape the sexual insinuation. That is not a negative, it is just a distinction, of the kind that is involved in defining categories – defining categories is the splitting of increasingly fine hairs.

Perhaps I shoot implied nudes in an effort to liberate the implied nude from the tacky associations it has acquired? Nah, that’s not it. I think I shoot them because the models want them, because there’s skill involved in arranging a shot so that some things are hidden and others aren’t, and because I like the resulting images. Maybe I’m a tease at heart? I can think of much worse things to be…

Not so in the studio. Here we are in control. If we wanted a candy-striped background we can have it (I may regret saying that…). We can even shoot against a chromakey background, and swap in any background image we want. Despite that, you’ll see three colours of background in the vast majority of my studio shots: white, black, and grey. There are good reasons for this.

When I am in a studio, I want attention focussed on the beautiful woman I am shooting. Using a simple background helps – there is little to look at other than the model. I’ve heard some people refer to a white background as “catalogue shooting” – the same techniques are used when shooting items for inclusion in a catalogue.

Black and white backgrounds are easy, at least in principle. When we bring a RAW image into Photoshop, we get to specify the levels that are considered ”black” and “white”. To get a pure black background we ensure that all of the background falls below the “black” level. To get a pure white background we ensure that all of the background is above the “white” level. This only works for black and white – I can’t force a blue background buying having the background fall above or below a specific level. If the background falls between the “black” and “white” levels, it will come out as a shade of whatever colour or pattern it happens to be.

Black background

To get a pure black background, we want the background to reflect much less light than the subject. We start by moving the subject away from the background, and arranging our lights so we spill as little light onto the background as possible. The less light we get on the background, the easier it will be to make it pure black. (in the image, Phoenix is sitting on a satin finish surface, hence the reflection below her)

It helps to be using a dark (ideally black) backdrop. I’ve used a variety of offerings, including a synthetic velour, which worked well enough, but was a magnet for lint and dust. My current favourite is a fabric that can be obtained from a theatrical supplier – its technical name is black Molton, but it is known in the trade as “commando cloth” or “blackout curtaining”. It’s a black brushed cotton fabric, pre-treated with flame-retardant chemicals. It comes around 3m wide, which is plenty for my home studio, but it is easily made into any desired width – it is used for the black curtains that go behind the fancy one in a theatre, after all – and it soaks up light. It is possible to get this fabric to reflect light, but you have to work at it!

White background

A pure white background is a little more complicated. This time we want to pour the light onto the background, instead of keeping it away. I’ve found the easiest means is to dedicate two lights to illuminating the backdrop, positioning one each side, aimed about one third of the way in to the centre. Conventional wisdom has it that you light the backdrop 3 stops brighter than the subject to make it white. I have experimented, and I rather like the results I get when I run the back lights at full power (2 x 600Ws for my current lights) - the extra light wraps around the model, giving an attractive rim-lighting, and a form of silhouette, if I don’t put a light on the model directly. Tavia is demonstrating this effect.

It helps if the backdrop reflects light well (although you can get almost anything to look white with enough light – I have turned a dark brown surface into white with a LOT of light). A plain white backdrop is good – I have used white polyester, white velour, and white paper – they all work, although a smooth surface can show irritating highlights, and a patterned surface is a disaster if your background lights aren’t bright enough. I have not been able to get white Molton, even though I’m assured that it exists – there just isn’t enough call for it (unlike black Molton). I am currently using a fabric from the same theatrical fabric source – this one is intended for use as a reflective surface, and it works well – it appears to reflect about a half-stop more light than the white polyester I was using previously. The only drawback is that it has a textured surface – if it is not blasted through to white, there is a texture to deal with.

Bear in mind that having the background very bright will upset Camera Raw’s normally reasonable auto processing. That’s OK – we just need to do some unusual processing.

Camera RAW processing

Once we have the RAW image, we need to bring it into Photoshop appropriately. The instructions below refer to Adobe Camera RAW for Photoshop CS2. The instructions for CS3 are similar.

If we want a black background, we need to raise the Shadow slider until the background is completely clipped to black – hold down the Alt key (on Windows) or Command (on Mac) while moving the slider to see the clipping.

If we want a white background, we need to work with the Exposure slider. We will be clipping the background again, but this time to white.

If we are shooting a full-length shot, it can be quite difficult to get the floor under the model to clip – usually we need to compromise. I have had some success using a narrow slot box to illuminate the floor when shooting for a white background, but it’s a work-in-progress. This isn’t a problem for shots that don’t go down to the floor.

Well, maybe not wrong, just not quite right. I had previously tried the 85mm on a 5D body. I tried it on a 1D Mark III body, and things changed. The 85mm f1.2L seems to focus more quickly on the 1D Mark III, enough so that I am no longer irritated by speed. And it seems to focus more accurately (the 1D Mark III seems to focus slightly more accurately than the 5D with most lenses) – I have not tested this objectively, but it is something I’ve noticed repeatedly. The results are crisp and sharp, very much like the 135mm f2L. It is still a heavy lens, but it doesn’t take too long to become accustomed to the balance of this lens on a 1D body.

As you may guess, I now own an 85mm f1.2L. On the 1D, with the 1.3x crop factor, the 85mm is a 110.5mm equivalent, making it a pleasant head-and-shoulders, down to half-length, lens. The 85mm has displaced the 135mm for a portion of my shooting. That’s mainly because the 135mm, on a 1D 1.3x crop, becomes a 175.5mm equivalent, which is rather too long for my studio.

The other new lens I’ve bought recently is a 35mm f1.4L. I bought this one because of a problem I’ve encountered with the venerable 24-70mm f2.8L zoom. On my 1D Mark III the 24-70mm lens does not focus well (it will be interesting to see if this is remedied by the sub-mirror assembly fix) – it can take up to 3 seconds for focus to stabilise, and that can be a long 3 seconds. What happens is that the lens judders back-and-forth around the correct focus, as though the camera is having trouble locating the exact focus. Sometimes it never does achieve acceptable focus. I looked at the focal lengths I use most often on the 24-70, and came to the conclusion that the 35mm f1.4L might be an acceptable substitute. I have a 50mm f1.4 for the slightly longer shots, and I’m happy to use 85mm instead of 70, so it was only the shorter length I needed. I rarely use 24mm, mainly because I shoot people, and 24mm is too distorting for most people photography.

I really like the 35mm f1.4L – it’s light, fast (in both senses: fast autofocus and wide aperture), and it never judders. It’s sharp. Not as sharp at the 85mm or 135mm, but that’s a high standard; it’s as sharp or sharper than the 24-70mm. Being f1.4 means that the viewfinder is bright. I would guess that Canon don’t sell a lot of these, because the average L-series lens buyer will get a 24-70 first – the 24-70mm is more flexible, and only slightly more expensive. You have to be dedicated to consider this lens. Pity, because it’s excellent.

While I’m raving about lenses, I noticed that Canon has announced that it is working on two new lenses. That seems a little odd – normally Canon announces a new lens, sometimes for availability later. This time they have announced that they are working on these lenses – I wonder if they have heard that someone else is about to announce some new lenses? Anyway, the new 200mm f2L IS and 800mm f5.6L IS are additions to the famous “white” lens range (really, it’s slightly off-white). The 800mm will probably warm the hearts of the paparazzi who make their living spying on celebrities – now they can do so at an even greater distance. Add a 1.4xTC and it’s a 1120mm f8 lens (without the TC the image is too clear…). The 200mm f2L is more interesting to me. It’s the successor to the feted 200mm f1.8 (discontinued a few years ago), adding IS, but losing half a stop. It is still a whole stop faster than the 200mm f2.8L. Judging by the photos, it will be roughly the size and shape of the 1.8 – not a lens to use for casual photography. I doubt I’ll get either of these lenses, but I could be wrong again…

Bear in mind that I am coming to the 1D Mark III as a user of a 5D and 30D (and originally a 350D), not as a user of previous 1D models. That is, amusingly, one of the paths that Canon has anticipated. The 1D Mark III is much friendlier to 5D And 30D users than earlier 1D models. The earlier 1D models had a strange interface, one not readily learned, or so I have heard it described by veterans. The 1D Mark III is the first 1 series camera with an interface that inherits from the one on the lower digital cameras (this has been hailed as a vast improvement over an interface which required the user to hold down two buttons while adjusting the ISO setting).

I could go on at length about features of the 1D Mark III, but there are plenty of reviews that do that.

There are problems with the 1D Mark III. That is not surprising considering its complexity, and how radical a change it is from its predecessors – it is a completely new camera which shares three things with the previous models:

• it has a chassis and build that’s recognisably similar – it is built to be tough and thoroughly weather-sealed
• it has similar specifications to previous models
• it is labelled “1D”

other than that, it’s a brand-new camera. Because it’s a brand-new design, that means there are teething problems.

The most well-known problems concern its AI Servo auto-focus, so carefully and thoroughly described in the Rob Galbraith article. I learned of this before collecting my 1D Mark III, but I thought about it, and decided it wouldn’t affect my photography – I haven’t used AI Servo autofocus on the 5D or 30D (they have a somewhat less sophisticated version), and I didn’t expect to start.

Less well-known, although also mentioned in the Rob Galbraith article, is a tendency to lose focus in dim light. When operating in One Shot autofocus, in dim light, the 1D Mark III may grab focus, then judder a little, losing it again – almost as though it is “hunting”. This is annoying, but I have only seen it in quite low light – light that is perceptibly dim, lower than regular room lighting. Accurate autofocus is readily regained by raising the lights. Although this does affect my shooting, I can deal with it. I do want Canon to fix this, though – I like shooting in dim light.

One other annoyance was the tendency of the 1D Mark III to switch from focussing on the foreground to focussing on the background rather too easily. This problem has been substantially remedied in the latest version of the firmware, version 1.1.0; my camera arrived with 1.0.8. I might wait until 1.1.1 becomes freely available – it fixes a few other bugs.

The firmware is large. Even compressed it comes to 10Mb, about double the size of the compressed file for 5D firmware. That is a large and complex piece of computer software, and it’s unsurprising it has bugs. Canon have a long history of fixing bugs in firmware, and releasing updates. I fully expect to see updates that will address the other focussing issues. Will they be able to fix all the problems with firmware updates? I hope so. Might they have to change some of the hardware in the camera, necessitating a recall? Possibly, but I don’t believe that will stop them fixing the camera. This is one of their flagship cameras – I believe they cannot afford not to fix it.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the 1D Mark III. It feels good to hold, and I like using it. I have the impression that it focuses more sharply than the 5D, using the same lenses. Even though the images are only 10 megapixels, instead of the 12.8 megapixels of the 5D, I find them highly detailed, and I suspect that the 14 bit resolution is working to my advantage in my high-contrast work. I thought I might be using the 5D and the 1D Mark III equally, but that’s not proving to be the case.

So, am I satiated? Well, no. While I was writing this, Canon announced the 1Ds Mark III – 21 megapixels of 14 bit goodness. Do I need such a beast? Maybe not. Do I want one? Oh, yeah! I think I can wait until we hear whether the 1Ds has the same auto-focus issues as the 1D Mark III, but not a lot longer…

First port of call for me is always Bridge. Bridge was a useful program in CS2, but CS3 has made it much more useful. Most particularly, its filtering is really powerful now. In CS2 I could filter by star rating (“show me the images rated 3 stars or more”) and/or colour (“show me the images tagged red or purple”), but that was all. Oh, I could use Find to show just JPEGs, for example, but that was limited. In CS3 I can filter in lots of ways at once - I can say “show me the images tagged ‘To Do’, in PSD files, worked on yesterday”; it’s near instant in switching from one filter to the next, too. This means I can show fewer images at once, and focus on the ones I want to change. Very nice. There are some cute extras, too – when I select a bunch of images it shows me more than one in the preview pane – that helps me check that I’ve selected the right ones. However, the filtering is the most powerful new feature for me.

Next is Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve liked Camera Raw for a while, especially after reading Real World Camera Raw by Bruce Fraser. It’s a fine tool for turning Raw files into PhotoShop files, and it’s essential to making the high-contrast images I like. The new version that is part of CS3 is ACR 4 (originally 4.0, but updated to 4.1 when they added RAW support for the Canon 1D Mark III, and some other cameras). 4.0 is a good release, but I miss the “Auto” checkboxes – I used to toggle these to compare default and Auto settings. 4.1 adds some important new features, including the Clarity slider on the main page, and a host of new settings on the Detail page. This is part of an approach with which I was not familiar – the idea of part-sharpening during RAW processing. I have always followed the “sharpen last” philosophy, but I’m coming around to this idea of doing some of the sharpening on the RAW before editing, then using a more subtle final sharpening pass. The Clarity processing is a form of contrast enhancement that looks a bit like sharpening, but isn’t. The changes in ACR 4.1 are much more substantial than you’d expect for a .1 release – I get the feeling that these were some ultra-cool features that just barely missed the 4.0 release. I’m glad to have them. 

CS3 won me over before I even got into PhotoShop proper. There are lots of changes in PhotoShop, too, but they don’t feel as important as the changes to Bridge and ACR. Of special note, however, is the new Simple Selection tool – this is a selection tool vastly superior to Magic Wand (the closest predecessor). It is extremely good at detecting edges, and making a selection that follows those edges – kind of like the Magnetic Lasso, but much faster and easier to use. I have found nothing better for making an initial selection. It has some useful Refine Edge features, too. You’ll want a fast CPU to use it, though – it is doing some serious processing to make things look easy.

 I’ve heard some whining about CS3 having lots of bugs. I must be lucky, because I haven’t hit anything significant, other than the printing being a bit broken (bad margins). I followed up some of the complaints I saw, and discovered that they were about the beta. Yup, there were bugs in the beta – that’s what a proper beta test is about! I’m sure there are still some bugs (I know of only two programs in the world without bugs), but Adobe are conscientious about issuing updates, so I suspect they will be addressed.

 All up, I really like CS3. I consider it my new weapon of choice in the on-going fight against flawed photos

I learned this lesson when I started taking photographs. I carefully lit my subject, producing a very even light (something I now know is called “flat lighting“), and an amazingly boring photograph; it was flat and lifeless. Thus began my adventure to learn about chiaroscuro (not that I knew that was what I was looking for). I hadn’t studied art, so I was oblivious to many centuries of learning on this subject.

You see, despite their complete lack of photographic equipment, painters of years past managed to produce images that were not boring, flat, and lifeless (well, some painters did…). They did this by painting not just light, but shadow too. We can learn from this.

A photograph or a painting is a two-dimensional object, but we are trying to capture three-dimensional space. In flat lighting we get a two-dimensional image that looks completely two-dimensional (one day I will shoot that deliberately, but I need to compose the idea carefully). There is no depth to the image. Such an image is often emotionally unsatisfying to the viewer. We expect to see depth, and we see it in the shadows. We can tell that an object has three dimensions because of the shadows cast on one part by shadows from another. A flat lighting setup eliminates those shadows, and eliminates the sense of depth that they conjure.

The way we achieve our necessary shadows is to use unbalanced lighting – if we use a bright light to one side of our victim (er, subject), it will cast shadows on the other side. If we place a bright light above, it will cast shadows below, and vice versa. Using a single bright light, we may get shadows which are too intense. We can reduce the intensity of the shadows by placing a second light to throw light into them. If that second light is as bright as the first, and placed at the same distance, it will completely destroy our shadows. That’s no good. So we make the second light dimmer, and/or further away. One ratio of brightness that has been shown to be effective over years of photography is having 3 stops of difference between the bright light and the dimmer one. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try other ratios, just that 3 stops is a good place to start.

Photographers who still use meters will trigger one of the lights and measure the result, then trigger the other, measure the result, then adjust the lights accordingly. I don’t. I position the two lights at the same distance from the model, and at the same angle (typically at about 45 degrees from the line between the model and the camera), and set them about 3 stops different – the lights display their intensity in (sort-of) f-stops. The Elinchrom 300RX ranges from 0.5 to 5.5, and setting 1.5 on one and 4.5 on the other yields a difference of 3 f-stops.

I wonder if anyone has analysed the great masters of portrait painting, and determined what the effective f-stop difference is between the two sides of the faces they painted?

When we use a telephoto lens (one with a focal length greater than 50mm), we compress perspective. Things that would look further apart to the human eye look closer together viewed with the telephoto lens. When we use a wide-angle lens, we exaggerate perspective – we make things look further apart than they would to the human eye. We can play with that effect.

If you’ve done any reading about photography you may have read warnings against using a wide-angle lens to shoot portraits. “Don’t do it!” the books warn, “It will distort features, it will make people look like they have huge noses. The results will be horrible!“. Some books will even show you examples, and they do look distorted.

However, that’s not all of the truth. Sometimes it can be very effective to use a distorted perspective. After all, we’re not making a documentary – we’re making art. Art can distort things to raise questions about them. Or to throw something into relief – to make it stand out from the background – to draw attention to it. Or we may just be trying to flatter our model: we may be trying to make her look as though her legs are longer.

In anime (Japanese animation) there is a technique called “super-deformed” characters, sometimes also called “chibi”. To indicate that a character is having a tantrum (or is very emotional), the animator may draw the character with a very large head and small body and limbs. This makes the character look cute, and generally suggests that we shouldn’t be taking the tantrum too seriously.

I wanted to get a similar effect with a model. I struck a problem, in that I can’t rub out a model’s head and redraw it – I’m just not that good an artist. So I switched to a wide-angle lens and did all the things the book tell us not to do. I zoomed to the most wide-angle setting (24mm on a 24-70mm f2.8L), then I got close to the model to maximise the ratio between distance from lens to face, and distance from lens to feet. That’s how we exaggerate proportions.

You can see the results in these images. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it worked surprisingly well for a first try. I’d be interested to hear what you think of this technique.

Maybe it’s the frisson of danger – most of the knives and swords I have are sharp (at least sharp enough to cut), and they are all unmistakeable weapons. Maybe it’s the sense of power: “armed and dangerous“.

Even if the model isn’t wielding the knife in a threatening manner, her possession of it makes us wary, makes us wonder if she is more dangerous than she appears to be. Even if she has no clothes on, she is not helpless. I like that a lot, because I like to depict women as strong, confident, and self-reliant. This is not a woman who needs a hero to protect her.

I particularly like the combination of naked skin and naked blades – one is soft, warm, inviting, while the other is hard, cold, threatening – a strong contrast. The “touch-me-not” quality of a nude with a sword is difficult to surpass  (maybe a nude with a hand grenade?). I’ve seen nudes with firearms, and they can be powerful images, but there is something more visceral about a sword. Possibly it’s because we’ve been trained (movies, TV) to think of gun-shot wounds as little holes that the hero will recover from quickly, but we can imagine a sword-slash – it’s a long gaping wound, and much more obvious. Maybe it’s that we are much more familiar with sharp edges – I am certain every adult has cut themselves with a knife some time. A sword is so clearly a large sharp edge, and so we are understandably more wary.

There’s more to it than that, though. Knives have been tools for a long time, dating way back into prehistory. Mankind may have started as a tool-user with an antelope thigh bone, but cutting edges were discovered early. Chipped flint, bronze, iron – all were turned into knives. How can firearms, known for mere centuries, contend against the sharp edges that date back millennia? Maybe there’s something in our pimaeval unconscious that loves and hates sharp edges, and that is what reacts within us? 

Besides, a knife is easy to understand. We could make a knife. There are lots of subtleties to making good knives (the right alloy, the right heat treatment, the right blade profile, …), and there are many ways a knife can be made attractive as well as functional, but the basics of a sharp edge are not a mystery. Contrast the complexities of a firearm.

No, I don’t think that’s all there is. There is something more. Hmm, maybe it’s time to shoot another model with a sword or knife?