Lately some of my focus has been changing. I have been working on all the things I had neglected from last year. I am finally working through many of the personal images I took last year and creating galleries for them. I am trying to begin to put some of those galleries on my Facebook profile to share them with others who have been wondering what I have been up to in my personal life. Yes, there is another side to myself and my work other then nude males. I am actually a photographer of many things and interested in a great deal of subjects. I recently posted the images from my trip last summer to Paris, the HOTEL FENLIN film project I was working on a few weeks back, as well as other work I loved from last year. I have a Facebook page for this Naked Man Project, which is restricted to adults and a Facebook page of my photography as a business of Terry J Cyr Photography that is open to general public. But my personal Facebook page is my own, more about me. I have been trying to build all aspects of who I am, but there are many boundaries that are becoming quite complex and are becoming difficult to draw distinctive lines between. Yesterday I received a note from someone, who is open minded and accepting about what I do, suggest that I tighten the restriction on my Facebook page because stuff I was posting seemed too mature for younger kids that may be on their parent’s Facebook pages. My immediate reaction was to delete the feed or link, which I did. This morning I got up and began to research Facebook for possible security restrictions and realized there really isn’t much in place for under aged individuals. Not that something like this would work if under aged children are on parent’s accounts that have friended me. My next reaction was to unfriend all the people I knew who had young children, and suddenly I began to realize I had fallen into a madness of self-censorship. I felt an anger beginning to grow within me; suddenly I could no longer be who I was or be accepted for what I was doing.
Most everyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with art and the creative process. It is my life and always has been. This past month I have softened the website a bit hiding questionable materials to a logon-only sort of basis and I guess in a sense I am beginning to feel that perhaps it’s not really my responsibility to censor myself. If what I do becomes an issue for people with children on the internet, perhaps they are the ones that should unfriend me instead or censor what their children are looking at on the internet. I am who I am and have always been an artist who expresses my passion. We now have one of the most powerful tools available to humanity that allows us to network and connect with other like-minded people around the world. I choose to use this tool to my advantage, to grow and converse with other artists from everywhere, share ideas, feelings, concepts, far beyond the chit-chat most use it to pour out there every day experience. This is my everyday experience! I post what I’m passionate about and things that have somehow moved me and I want to share with others who I think might have a similar experience with the same materials. The “306” SHORT GAY FILM” video I posted to my website yesterday, has a powerful message of hidden identity, though some of it is graphic, is filled with emotion captures the duality of what many of us feel. I do not want to have to compartmentalize who I am or restrict what I feel. After all this is a global experience for all to share.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a series of images using a single light source. I mounted a single light on a boom and suspended it directly above the subjects. I also added just a little bit of spill on the black seamless paper at the back of the wall. Yesterday George came to look at the proofs from last week and I asked if I could use him for a quick test of the light set up to see the results. Everything was locked in where I wanted it, except I forgot to change the color balance back to studio strobe from shooting live theatre the other day. The first shot was stunning, resulting in an amazing mistake, adding a bluish cast to the overall exposure. Theater incandescent lights are rated at a color temperature of 3200K, measured in Kelvin; studio strobes are balance to simulate more of a daylight at about 5500K. The color temperature fluctuates depending on where you are shooting and is something photographers are always aware of when they are working in color. So the way the color temperature works is the lower the number on the chart the warmer the color of the light, for instance candle light is very warm at about 1900K, the higher the number the cooler the color temperature, open daylight can run upwards of about 6500K. Yes, it seems like a contradiction, as so much of photography does, but color temperature is read on an actual scale with the lower numbers actually starting in the red and yellows (warmer) to the higher numbers ending in deeper blues and purples (cooler). The settings on most cameras are now set to a standard icon that represents the closest to that color temperature for the situation you are in and neutralize the color temperature making it appear natural. A light bulb is for incandescent and the clouds for shade, a lighting bolt for strobe. Many new cameras automatically read the temperature and automatically set it.
So anyway, once we saw the result on George’s skin tones, we became very excited and began to explore the possibilities for about 20 minutes as he began to strip down so I could see how it was affecting his skin tones. The images are simple and the color works beautifully with his dark skin tones. It was a happy mistake. Sometimes we have to think outside the parameters of where we normally work. I tend to not work outside of them too much because I pretty much know where I want the final images to go, but when I was younger I did a lot of experimentation to understand all the possibilities, but then as we got older we tend to gravitate toward what eventually becomes our signature style, and we just begin to refine it. I tend to always shoot my images with just a slightly warmer color temperature than normal, which I have calibrated into my camera, because it feels a little richer and becomes more romantic and I love what it does to the skin tones and it also turned my gray walls into a warm greenish glow. It takes years to come up with a style to match your own personality and vision; but today I have moved in another direction. I will play with it and see what happens.
I spent the weekend putting together a profile and gallery for the Indiana artist Jim Ferringer. I have admired Jim’s work for a long time and aspire to create such beauty. After seeing the way this feature come together, I sense in my gut this website is going to become something quite remarkable. It seems that I put a lot of time into each part of it, but overall I love the cleanness of the final galleries. Jim’s work is a mixture of classic images and styles from every period conceivable and his portfolio so prolific that it was hard to choose which images to feature. I could distinctly see different movements in the work. This project seems to keep growing and becoming better as I hone and perfect it. It is amazing to get this close to other artists that I have admired and adored for so long.
I have been working on the image of George that I took earlier this week. For the shoot I recreated the same light I had used for Seth the previous week because I have been working this concept of a single light source coming in from the left as the only means of light. It is a very narrow channel of light, there was a second light set up with a snoot to create a specific high light on the backdrop for to highlight and separate the subjects. It is amazing see how different the subjects are with almost identical lighting and how much the skin tones absorb that and refract that light. On one it seems harsh while on the other it is smooth and even. I often find a concept and explore the man variations of possibility within that idea.
I have not seen it snow like this in a very long time. We have had probably close to two feet up here to my studio in the Rattlesnake in the past forty-eight hours. I stayed inside all day yesterday and worked on the website. It is finally becoming what I envisioned from the beginning. The home page has been reworked. I have completed the galleries for the blog months of November and December. Giving people quicker and easier access to last year’s blog project. I have also begun adding images to The Naked Man Project Facebook page and posting some of the images on some of the Facebook feed galleries created by other artist. It’s getting a good response on a French feed.
