Cherise and her friends had a body painting party a couple of weeks ago, and wanted me to come along and photograph. How could I say no?

Rooftop shenanigans

We roasted on the way over. (90 degrees. Car has no air conditioning. $1000 to fix. No thank you sir.) Once we got there, I found myself surrounded by scantily clad women. The hottest thing of all though was- you guessed it- the dynamic range I was able to get out of my Nikon.

You can see here that I shot right into the sun, but was still able to get a nice amount of detail in the shadows. Shooting RAW allows you to pull off shots like this- details in shadows and extremely bright areas can by pulled out in areas usually inaccessible if you’re shooting plain old jpegs. It takes more processing time, but is worth the extra effort.

That said, I didn’t let digital have all the fun.

Love and peace

Up on the roof

I shot this on the Leica MP rangefinder with a 50mm Summilux ASPH lens, the most brilliantly over-engineered 50mm lens around. 50mm is typically a standard focal length, and is an excellent focal length to learn on. Henri Cartier-Bresson shot on 50mm almost exclusively. Keeping all this in mind, I can’t figure out why it’s one of the most glossed over focal lengths around. Canon, Nikon, Sigma, etc.- none of these companies make a completely solid 50mm 1.4 lens. Leica’s is great, but it costs an arm and a leg, and I was lucky to find an extremely well priced used one.

For a couple of years, all I had was a Canon AE-1 and 50mm 1.8. If you’ve got a new SLR/DSLR, I strongly recommend picking up a 50mm equivalent. If you’re lucky enough to have a full frame camera, a 50mm will do. More likely than not, you’ve got a crop factor to deal with, in which case a 35mm lens usually does the trick.

By the way, the film I had in the Leica was Fuji Astia slide film. Incredible stuff. Not to say the digital didn’t perform admirably.

Nice makeup

Nice hair

I’m not particularly a fan of artificial lighting, so everything was was shot with available light. At the beginning of the day, the daylight was quite harsh, and shooting indoors with window light or shooting in the shade was in order. (It was too bloody hot outside anyway.)

In times like these, shots of people waiting around make for comically absurd photojournalism shots.