I’ve always admired photographers that start and complete photo projects. It’s something that I’ve seemingly never had the dedication to see through to completion, until now. The idea for this shoot came about from watching a particular scene in Bladerunner 2049. It would take me a bit of time to explain the specific scene and exactly how it inspired me, but the basic gist of it was to create some kind of linear beam of light that was color gelled. I wanted it to feel very minimal, and somewhat science fiction. While I keep the light linear for most of the photos, I did experiment a bit with it as a backlight, which produced some very interesting effects.
The first dilemma I faced was figuring out how I would even create the light. When I began the project in late 2019 there were probably a few different options on the market that would have been a lot easier than the modifier I ended up using – but like pretty much all of my personal work the budget was effectively zero. The cheap(er) modifier I ultimately discovered could produce the light, but the extremely challenging part of this shoot was that the light wasn’t constant. I could do a test fire of the strobe to get an idea of where and how the light would land, but had it been constantly visible it would be have been so much easier for each of my subjects to work with the beam. To say that this shoot was difficult both for the models and myself is an understatement.
The next major hurdle was where to do the shoot. I don’t have a studio, and as I mentioned the personal project budgets are often nonexistent. Plus I had decided early on that I wanted the challenge of doing a fully nude shoot – this does tend to impact where one can go. I decided to use the little space I had at my disposal. So for each of the shoots I emptied the contents of our roughly 10×10 guest room. Obviously some post production was involved in making the space appear more vast.
I did not photograph the colors in order. The actual order I photographed the rainbow went: yellow, orange, pink, teal, red, purple, blue, and finally green. I let each of the subjects choose their color, and initially I was just going to do the standard rainbow. However, I had requests for pink and teal so why not expand the rainbow just a little? It took me over a year and a half to find a model willing to tackle the final color, and I’m still a bit in disbelief that it’s really done!
A special thank you to all the amazing women who trusted my vision and put so much energy into these photos!
CREDITS:
Red
Pink
Orange
Yellow
Green
Teal
Blue
Purple
Hair & Makeup (red, green, blue, & purple)
