As mentioned in my recent post Painted Backdrops, we were recently in the studio/gallery of painter Jose Luis Rodriguez Guerra, so Tiberio could be filmed in action creating a couple La Figa pieces for an upcoming movie. The title of the film is SHINE – it is a documentary about independent business people, produced by Dan McComb (co-founder founder of Biznik), and directed by Seattle film-maker Ben Medina. Here are some “making of” shots from that day…

(Pop quiz for the photographers reading this – why is the background so blue in the third shot? How would you fix it in post-processing if it bothered you?)

Use of painted backdrops is quite standard in photography. I generally find them to be ok at best, and horrifically cheesy at worst. But it is not every day you get to use absolutely gorgeous painted backdrops that are each worth substantially more than your car.

Yesterday, Tiberio and I brought the La Figa live installation to the studio/gallery of Jose Luis Rodriguez Guerra – an  incredibly talented painter, originally from Mexico, but now living and working in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Tiberio is being featured in an upcoming documentary film, and we were there to get footage of him creating some La Figa pieces. Jose was kind enough to lend his space for the filming. More details about the movie (and of course still photos) will be coming in my next blog post, after I have had a chance to post-process the images.

While waiting for some extra video lighting to arrive, I did a spontaneous quick shoot with Reyna, one of our absolute favorite La Figa models. Regular readers (and anybody who was at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival this year) will undoubtedly recognize her. Jose generously allowed us to use his stunning canvases as the backdrop for these photographs.

Also note that Reyna is available for modeling gigs of all kinds. If you have a project that she would be suited for, and would like to get in touch with her about it, just drop me a line, and I will introduce you.

(Click for larger images)

Daniel Cardenas of NWLive.tv has posted the video of the La Figa installation that he shot at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. Here is the post,  or watch the embedded version right here…

And also see this video about SEAF from www.seattleiam.com, which has some brief footage of Tiberio and the La Figa installation.

After all of these months of preparation, it is a bit hard to believe it is really over. But it is true, the 2009 Seattle Erotic Art Festival is now just a memory. The organizers did an absolutely incredible job – this was by far the best SEAF ever. The huge space at the Seattle Center really worked well, the art, performers, and DJ’s were all top notch, and the midnight to 4AM after parties on Friday and Saturday rocked the house.

Our La Figa installation was also a smashing success – people really seemed to love it. We had eight large framed prints on our wall space, and Tiberio created new works of food and body art on over a dozen models over three nights.

I have posted three albums of images from the festival:

• The La Figa Installation (53 images)
  
• People and Art (46 images)
  
• Performers (37 images)
  

And here are a few favorites…

There was a great article about Tiberio and the La Figa project in the biggest newspaper in Tiberio’s home region of Italy on Saturday. You can see the pdf of the newspaper’s front page, and the story page, or read the web version,  or Google’s (attempted) translation of the article into English.

I just updated www.lafigaproject.com with all the details on our special installation at the 2009 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, as well as  some new photos, so check it out.

Here is our promo postcard for the event (postcard and logo  by Giannina Silverman, of RocketRanch Design). Click the images for larger versions…

Tiberio and I did a wonderful shoot last weekend with a model in her seventies. The concept was to create a citrus triptych – one good shot each of lemon, lime, and orange. Here are a few outtakes…

I can’t decide whether or not to take out the earring in this last shot. I kind of like the way it echoes the rings of the lemons, but on the other hand, jewelry really doesn’t belong. Thoughts?

Tiberio and I did another La Figa shoot last weekend, this time with a much curvier model than we have shot to date, and the results were phenomenal. After a series of very high key shoots with the white seamless paper background, I felt drawn back to the black velvet backdrop. The black velvet gives a totally different effect than the black paper (which can be seen in our Strawberries Redux shoot). The black paper can be anywhere from medium gray to almost black, depending on what you do with the lighting. The black velvet on the other hand reflects almost no light at all, so as long as you don’t light it directly, it pretty much disappears from the shot.

Here is one of the lighting set-ups I used. Note that the big softbox on the right is turned off – this is just a two light arrangement. A strip softbox coming in from the left, and a gridspot coming down from above and behind…

(click for larger versions)…

Here are a couple shots showing what I got with this set-up…

The first food arrangement we did involved melon…

But the really good stuff we got involved radishes. The results were spectacular – expect to see one of our final images from this arrangement on the wall at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival…

Our model brought along a friend who happens to be a talented photographer by the name of Jason Wolf, so we actually got some behind the scenes shots of me for a change…

Here are some more behind the scenes images from a La Figa shoot. We did two different ingredients – apples (really really tiny ones), and Zucchini. Most of the lighting we have been doing lately has been very low key (in the technical sense of the phrase) – black or dark grey backgrounds, and very sparse shadowy lighting set-ups, usually with just a couple lights. This time we decided to mix it up, so I put together a very high key set-up. We used the white seamless paper, swept down to the floor, then up and over a table (actually two tables put together so it would be as wide as the 9 foot paper, to avoid creases).

There are four lights. Two softboxes just on the background, set to overexpose it to pure white. Usually when I shoot white paper I try to keep the paper visible - white, but not pure white, so this is a bit different. When the paper is visible you need to think about keeping it evenly lit, which can be a bit tricky. With it overexposed like this, you don’t really have to worry about it too much. The key light is a large rectangular softbox turned sideways and put about eight feet high in front. There will be a little bit of bounce coming back up from the paper as well. There is also a kicker/hair light up high and behind. Since one of our strobes is in the shop,  I used a Nikon SB-800 flash unit in SU-4 remote mode (so it slaves to any flash) here. This worked very well, and it had no trouble keeping up with the studio strobes. Since it is only a providing a little bit of highlight I wasn’t too concerned about whether the color temperatures matched.

Here are a few shots that show the set-up…

As usual, I am not going to show the final images we got, as those are being saved for publication in the book. However, here is a sample image that shows the results of this lighting set-up…

The next set-up - Zucchini Lingerie - was almost the same. The only difference was that we pulled the table out, and had two models standing on the paper. Here is Tiberio putting together the Zucchini Lingerie…

Here are some shots from the latest round of photographing ingredients for La Figa: Visions of Food and Form. You would think working with inanimate food items would be easier than working with the models, but definitely not. Some of these ingredients have been really tricky to make look good - after two attempts we still have not gotten any avocado shots that we like. And photoshopping out the individual dust specks on the plexiglass is starting to get a bit old. But it is certainly worth it once it is all done - we really love some of these images.

Click on the images for larger versions…

The La Figa: Visions of Food and Form book is going to involve photographs of the ingredients we use just by themselves, as well as on our models. To that end, we have been doing a lot of food photography lately. These are taken on black plexiglass, with a black velvet backdrop – the real life version of the reflection on black special effect that is starting to become quite prevalent these days, especially in Mac software. Though the reflections are real, there is a lot of Photoshop work on these – when shooting close-up like this, especially with the backlighting I was using, every last microscopic speck on the plexiglass would show up in the images. Despite our best efforts to keep the plexi clean and polished, there was always some amount of particles on it, so I had to photoshop it all out.

Click on the images for larger versions…

Continuing to revisit some of our favorite ingredients, we did our second strawberry shoot this weekend (18 months after our first one), with an absolutely stunning afro-korean model.

Click the thumbnails for larger images…

No strawberries in this shot, but it is one of my favorites from the day. It would be perfect for a cellphone advertising billboard, don’t you think?

One of our very first shoots with the La Figa Project was a woman covered head to toe in cucumber slices. The book is going to be structured around the individual ingredients, so we are starting to revisit some of the ones we have already shot in order to have more variety for each one. To that end, last week we did a new shoot with sliced cucumbers, this time on a man. Here are some behind-the-scenes images from this shoot. Click the thumbnails for larger versions…

As Tiberio and I have shown our book prototype for La Figa: Visions of Food and Form, we have noticed that people really really like the two pages of “making of” photos that we have in the back. So I thought it would be fun to use this blog as a way to share some of our behind the scenes shots from the work we have been doing.

One of the funnest shoots this summer was when we went up to Dog Mountain Farm in Carnation with two beautiful sisters and a case of blueberries. There we found the two biggest horses any of us had ever seen in our lives. Luckily the sisters grew up on a farm themselves, so the model was not averse to being partially buried in compost (which actually is sterile).

Click the thumbnails for larger images…

The final images from this shoot are not currently online, so you will have to wait until our book comes out to see them.

As you may know, my primary photographic project right now is La Figa: Visions of Food and Form, a photographic exploration of food and the human body that I am working on in conjunction with chef Tiberio Simone.  A couple updates on that:

First, I have just put up a brand new site for the project – www.lafigaproject.com. There are a some new photographs from the series that have not been online yet, and a separate La Figa only email announcement list you can sign up for. However if you are on my photography announcement list you will receive all the La Figa information.

Secondly, we have been talking to the organizers of the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, and we can now confirm that Tiberio and I are going to have a major presence at the 2009 event. This is a very exciting development for us – it is probably the preeminent erotic art festival in the country (at least it comes to the top of a google search for “erotic art festival”).

I am going to post a few highlights from this year’s La Figa shoots to this blog, so keep an eye on the rss feed.

At this point we are cutting down on the shooting and working on putting together a solid book proposal to start sending out. So if you have any good connections to literary agents, please let us know.