The Blue Bodies © Bill DuBose, All Rights Reserved

This photo (© Bill DuBose, All Rights Reserved) was one of the highlights of our young career. We had started with this account, earning our way in first on technical quality, product inserts, display stands, etc. Our first cover “The Sandfaces” was sort of a last resort for our designer client’s client, the manufacturer. See the details on that one in a follow up posting..

So, the opportunity arose for us to come up with the concept again for this client, as we had the year before. I was feeling my oats, and wanted to do something daring, kinda like what we had done the year before.  So, while meeting with our designer clients to brainstorm, I immediately blurted out “Nudity!” One rarely finds an excuse to use such a lurid, sensationalist image in proper society, so after the chuckles died down, I tried to make it work. “Nude body parts, shot in the abstract, like landscapes, mountain ranges, from outer space!” These guys, two lady designers and my partner Columbia, were game for entertaining just about anything within budget.

The guy and gal models were absolutely cool with the concept, as nobody’s essentials were revealed or exposed. The casting session had proved most enlightening.

Shot back in the days of film, the exposure and lighting were a little tricky. In order to keep the highlights from blowing out white, we lit the bodies with backlit softbox on flat black background with a blue gel inside the softbox, and used a blue incandescent lightbulb as an ambient fill. This provided the option to include movement blur in the final composition, which we utilized using various shutter, aperture and movement variations. Having set up using polaroids on 2-1/4 camera brought us very close on exposure range, and bracketing for exposure, ambient exposure, depth of focus and variations on movement gave us a lot of great images to choose from.