About Many rivers to cross  

Hi,

I am an amateur photographer. I live in France. I am 40+ year old.

I don't know how to describe my work since I feel like I want to explore so many different paths. Briefly said, I love women's sensuality, I am very interested in the various ways they can express it. I have also started to explore the sexuality of couples and what emotions pictures of sexual acts can convey.

I value feedback a lot. Positive or negative, as long as it is honest and respectful. It can be technical feedback, pure emotional feedback, or feedback from the clouds of imagination, I will read it with much pleasure.

January 2010 update - gears and lighting:

I shoot most of my model pictures with Nikon gears: a D200 body plus a combination of fixed lenses for the most part (24mm f/2.8 AF-D, 35mm f/2 AF-D, 50mm f/1.8 AF or 50mm f/1.2, 85mm f/1.4 AF-D) as well as a zoom lens on some occasions (17-35mm f/2.8 AF-S).

Unless I cropped an image you can find its technical details from the Flickr page of the picture: on the right side you can see something like "taken with a Nikon D200" and immediately below it there is a link that says "More properties". There you are. If you don't see any of these mentions, it is likely that I cropped the image using some software that did not transfer the picture details over with the cropped version.

I use or not a tripod. I have two Gitzo's, one with a ballhead and one with a very old styled screw-in mount. I also have a L-bracket on my D200 which makes mounting it on the ballhead a snap. However I tend not to use this tripod anymore these days, and it is probably a shame. I have gained on flexibility - I can walk around, up and down in very acrobatic positions without having to worry about the stability of my tripod, but I have lost on the technical quality of many shots that are far less sharp than they could've been if I had used my tripod. Also, I have been compensating by going higher in the ISO but the D200 isn't a D700, so I have to make do with some extra noise in the darker areas. I might revert to the good habit of using my tripod.

Natural light is my favorite source of light and is the primary source I use in the vast majority of my pictures here, unless stated in the description. I use natural light because it gives me the quality and the flexibility I need without the hassle of carrying and setting up special equipment.

Ok, sometimes natural light doesn't make it all. One has to know how to play with daylight variations, and even though sometimes it just won't work the way we want it to. For those cases I have two types of light gears:

- One Nikon Speedlight SB-600: very versatile, relatively lightweight, I tend to carry it with me as much as possible even though I don't use it often at all.

- One Elinchrom 400W: quite powerful, and it can accept accessories such as barndoors, different types of bowls, umbrellas, softboxes, etc. I have a variety of those. I like to play with it but find the whole set too heavy and cumbersome thus I end up not carrying it with me very often.

Ok, that's it for now. When I have more time I might describe in some details my light measurement technique. Not that I invented anything nor that I am particularly proud at myself here, but I get frequent questions on this very topic so I thought it would deserve a section here. Stay tuned!