Proud to present: Night Photography + Cut Paper + Nude Model = Start of a massive project

I have been dreaming about this project for nearly 4 years. After spending a lot of time working out mechanics of dressing someone in paper and honing my night exposure abilities, I felt I was ready to make this happen while on art sabbatical in Denver. Enjoy, and look forward to more of this. I intend to make this a gallery show + coffee table book. Shot on location at Barr Lake near Denver International Airport. Special thanks go to Sky Donohue for being creative, professional and brave enough to try this unusual project (Thank you, Sky!). Also I wish to thank Frank McDaniel from MAC Group and Denver Pro Photo Supply for their incredible support from gear to processing film. Deepest thanks!

These first two are really the essence of my vision for this project - dressing nudes in hand-cut paper for long exposures that include star trails and perhaps more. These are digital from my D700. I also shot film with my Mamiya 7II and Toyo VX125. When those are scanned, I will share. Here is one 6x7 - the 4x5" film got blown at the airport :( I am very partial to the film shot, as the hour-long exposure makes the star trails look like rock stars.

After the jump, see some dusk outtakes we worked on while waiting for complete darkness and clouds to clear (which happened around 11pm).

The work involved in making these fashions was very detailed, yet fun. There were many iterations, fittings and start-overs. Here are some BTS photos of the process:

I used a Profoto D1 Air 500 Kit (2 heads) for this plus a Profoto BatPac for power. I decided I wanted very tight control over the light that included harsh, crisp shadows to complement the paper edges that also did not flood the foreground with light. The D1 grids are awesome, but I wanted even more control. So I made my own 30" snoots from roll paper and white gaff tape. What a perfect light!

This kept the light on the model only and allowed the 8-minute (digital) and 1-hour (film) exposures to be filled out by ambient light, not flash.

Stay tuned! This project will continue fora while until I have a body of work for the show and book. Follow me here in the RSS Feed, Twitter or Facebook.