Naked, Naked, Naked: Exposing Myself

I've been thinking more about making nude art, with a goal of submitting for Nude Nite 2013.   It's oddly difficult to imagine taking naked photos of someone.  I have a profile on Model Mayhem and there are plenty of models who are available to do nude shoots in exchange for photos for their portfolio.  Still, it's a pretty weird thought.  I've never actually worked with a model before, although I would love to.  But nakedness makes things weird ("Nice to meet you, this is my first time working with a model, now take off all your clothes!") and also logistically difficult -- I really don't have nearly enough space/light to set up a decent studio in my house, and doing it outside would be potentially... illegal.


Anyway.  Obviously, the easiest and most accessible model would be me.  Boy, that's a thought.  I am very aware of the possiblity of photos with artistic lighting, cropped creatively, that could show nudeness but without showing flabby 45 year old horrors.  (I suppose a portrait of flabby 45 year old horrors might be artistic in itself, but I will leave that particular artistic statement for someone more courageous than I).  I don't hate my body, I really don't, but I'm not happy with how out of shape I am, and the idea of going through tons of photos of myself naked just seems like an exercise in pain.

There are many wonderful things about my loving husband. Sadly, willingness to be photographed naked is not among them.

Then I had the idea of taking a few close-up photos of my vagina.  (When I say "vagina" I am referring to all the various external woman-y bits in the vagina-y region.)  My husband was willing to help me out with this, and stood in as my guest photographer.

Now, I am not unfamiliar with the topography, but I guess I have never really seen my vagina that closely before.  Looking at it in a mirror is a completely different thing.  I was kind of shocked at how completely foreign it looked.

There is no way I could have picked my own vagina out of a photographic line-up.

My plan is to make digital fine art from the photos, possibly layering other photos and/or text.  It would be kind of neat to end up with something so different looking that people would have to stare at it a while to work out where the nudity was.  Subtle vagina.

The funny but somewhat unfortunate thing is, I keep forgetting that plugging my iPod Touch into the computer will automatically bring up iPhoto, which has the default setting of displaying the most recently uploaded photos.  So I'm looking for the new update for Angry Birds, and all of a sudden it's like OMG VAGINA.  Yikes.