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…