Back in February I had this idea for a ‘wet material’ shoot. I was kinda looking for a clinging see through material that would ripple on the skin. I had no idea if this would work as I wanted the shoot to be lit with stage lights not studio flash. This would of course mean very high ISO and very long shutter speeds as the stage lights would be the only lighting. Chrissie Red agreed to do the shoot in her new flat and that was just ideal as her flat hadn’t been finished yet building wise and was still a little bit rough at the time. Now, having shot images in her flat before I knew that some of the images at ISO 6400 lost detail when printed at A4 size, it was just a very dark and difficult for the camera to autofocus on a previous shoot. So this time I set the ISO to auto but max at 2000, this meant shutter speeds of nearly 1 secound though most turned out to be 1/8s. The other factor was that the stage lights had 4 colours which rotated at regular intervals if there was no noise, if you shouted or made a noise the lights would go random colours…basically they are noise to light based. The other good thing I liked about them is that they made a pattern and each lamp looked different, another added bonus was that because the shutter speed was so low the lights could change within the 1/8s giving a different clour from the existing  four. It was all very experimental and random, we used  gause type materials of green and brown and cream, sometimes we would throw the gause in front of the camera during the shot…just generally trying ‘in camera’ effects. We had a lot of problems though, one of which was that there was no hot water, so we used freezing cold water on the material and a spray gun of icy water to skoosh Chrissie with….I have to say….she did squeal…hehe. Anyways it was a fun intereting shoot though the results were a tad unusual and a lot of shots just didn’t work out. However we did get a few shots that were very different.

I think I would return to this idea at some point, prehaps spend more time on creating effects using more material and getting an assistant would help a lot.

As always Chrissie is a star!