ChoJin’s Quarter

Ok, I’m going to try to update this blog more often now.

So today’s topic is photography. As my photo gallery should show you, I kind of like doing photography… I’ve always been fascinated by people portraits, and especially female fine art (implied) nude. Yes I know how it sounds like… That’s the problem I had 10 years ago, which is why I never tried to really pursue this interest. How in the hell can you ask a woman to model nude for you when you are 17 years old and you have absolutely no experience…? So I never really tried to pursue this interest. Even if I would have had the talent (and the equipments) I was too shy anyway. Thus, as usual, I mostly spent my years reading books about fine art nude, fascinated and admiring other people’s technique and talent.

Why do I like nude photography so much? I don’t really know, there is just something special about it. I like the way the shadows plays with the skin. Sometimes you don’t even recognize the body part, and it looks like a nice landscape taken from the Sahara desert at sunset. Nude is so much more than what most people think, it is also a very hard field. So much have already been done, how can you be different? It’s so hard to make the photo special, to make the photo worth taking more than 1 second to look at it. I’ve never tried to shoot nude yet, but I can tell the difficulty of this field by the way I look at nude photography books. I will turn the pages very fast, never spending more than 1s on each picture, and over 200 photo, I might only stop on 3 or 4 of them and to star at them. That’s how difficult it is, how difficult it is to make people actually care about the photo, care about the subject, and actually been moved while looking at the picture. It’s so much more than just showing a naked woman to a bunch of perv’. And unfortunately that’s how most people will perceive you if you dare telling them you love, or even worse, you would like to do fine art nude photography.

But anyway… since I don’t have models to work with for the moment, I figured out I could practice on myself. No, not nude, don’t worry!
It’s a good timing I thought, I had no “O.K.”picture of me for the past few years (I would even say that the last good one was 8years ago…), I’ve just lost around 16kg (35 lbs), and 11kg (25lbs) more are on their way to go, but we’ll come back on this subject another day. I also recently got my annual/2y hair cut… Hey, what did I need more? Oh yes, shaving!

So yesterday I took out one of my 500K tungsten light with its nice umbrella. I couldn’t find my tripod, which is apparently at one of my friend’s place, so I used my mini 4′’ tripod, with a couple of boxes to make it high enough (you have no idea how stupid the setup looked like) and I started shooting… at me. It was quite tricky. First of all I’m not a model, and I don’t like being in front of the camera, so don’t be surprised if I don’t smile on pictures… Also I usually use only one focus point to focus, lock and then re-frame. Obviously here I couldn’t, so I let the camera used all the focus points. It’s a little bit frustrating not being able to see what the camera is currently shooting. Also some pictures which could have been good were out of focus because the camera had decided my ear was worth more than my eyes… How could it dare?! But it was not all that bad, in my unfortunate setup, I had an IR remote control, hence I didn’t have to run between the camera and the position because of a stupid timer. For the pictures I used my beloved Canon Digital Rebel (300D), the fantastic 50mm f1.4 lens set at f2.2, with a simple “one light through umbrella” setup. And of course there are some photoshop works, but not too much.

Here are the results (click on the pictures to get a bigger version):

I created an album for them: Self Portrait Album. I might put them in the “Exposed”/Portfolio album, I’m not sure yet, hopefully I will get comments to tell me if I should or shouldn’t.

That’s it for today!