It's ironic that my photos of Lillias Right at dawn in Seattle have just been published in Lightreadings Magazine, because -- purely coincidentally -- I've been working on repeating that theme. It's one I'm drawn to as the dark counterpoint to my theme of nudes in nature: depicting not scenes of humans in their natural state in harmony with nature, but rather, humans in their most natural state contrasted with an urban environment. But it's devilishly difficult to do, and not just because it requires traveling a couple of hours up the road to the city at obscene hours of the day. The very nature of a night shoot is that light is as thin as oxygen on the summit of a mountain -- the camera's sensor gasps for it, seeing stars in the form of digital noise, its vision shallow, its shutter slow and vulnerable to the slightest shake.

You compensate as well as you can, bracing the camera on a tripod or monopod, exhorting the model to hold still, taking half a dozen shots at a time in hopes that one of them will be reasonably blur-free. It's a delicate balance. ISO: too high, and the details disappear into noise. Shutter: too slow and even the click of the shutter, or the model's breathing, ruins the picture. Aperture: too wide, and your focus has to be spot-on to even have a chance of sharpness, and you hope it's the eyes and not the adjacent cheek rather than vice versa.

You throw away a lot of pictures.

But that's part of the challenge as well, and the feeling of accomplishment when it all works is very satisfying.

Which brings us to Kit Ashton! I'd put out a call for models and a couple of people responded. Two of them followed through -- you'll hear about the other in another post. Kit's a local non-binary model and member of the Seattle fetish community who was very enthusiastic about the art I was trying to create. Another challenge of this theme is that it necessarily involves being nude out in public in the middle of a city, which takes a bold person, but Kit assured me that "luckily people don't bother me," and luckily for me they were being 100% honest!

We did a lot of planning ahead of time, each of us scouting routes and agreeing on a general itinerary and time. We met at 4am at the top of Pike Street, shooting at striking viewpoints of the city just off the busy road (albeit not so busy that time of the morning). There's a set of classical Greek pillars at one intersection, and just down the road from it a nice view out across Interstate 5 looking toward a new annex of the Convention Center. We took an extended detour through the edge of Freeway Park, with views of the skyline and geometric staircases. (I was so focused on my photography that I didn't even notice, till I looked at the photos later, a security camera right above that staircase. If anyone was watching, they didn't send anyone to intervene.) Kit's girlfriend, along for the adventure, was incredibly helpful, not only keeping an eye out, but also suggesting poses and settings, and making minor adjustments to Kit's hair and hand placement that had major positive effects on the resulting image.

Ultimately, as the hour got later (or, less early), we decided to skip the middle part of Pike Street and skip to the end for a few shots at Pike Place Market. Again, most people would have steered away from such a busy location just as it was waking up for the day, but Kit was unfazed. We got some fantastic shots in the street in front of the Market, then inside, and finally behind the Market overlooking the waterfront. In most cases people completely ignored us (we tried to keep our distance, but it's a busy place), but in front of the Market, as we were wrapping up our set, one of the vendors approached us to say we'd made his day, he'd never seen anything like us before.

I have a couple of other shoots to edit first, but it won't be too long till I have edited versions of this set to share with you. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these early previews!