It is rare for me to do back-to-back photo sessions with the same person. But it is also rare to feel such an intense artistic connection with a model.

That's the situation I found myself in with Xhibited. My first session with her was at night in Seattle, one of the most challenging and complicated settings in which I work. There are so many variables--rain, cold, low light, the public setting, the time of day (evenings are difficult for me due to a chronic health condition). Add to that the challenge of working with a relatively inexperienced model for the first time, and my expectations were, realistically, modest.

But the results were far better than expected artistically, which you can read about in my earlier blog post. And more than that, I found a real human connection with my muse. So when she suggested a follow-up session, I readily agreed.

And what can I say about these photos but... holy moley, Batman. The intensity of these images just blows me away. Seriously, I'm surprised my image sensor didn't melt. The vulnerability, the nakedness of these photos makes even me, a devout nudist, blush. But that same naked vulnerability also gives the images a raw beauty that I find luminous. It's like peering into the heart of a nuclear reactor--awesome and dangerous and transcendent, all at the same time.

With Xhibited's permission, in the second half of our photo session I shifted away from erotic portraiture and more toward abstraction. I wanted to capture body shapes, shadows, angles, textures, folds, creases, swollen hills and damp caverns. I liked the results so much that, with a few of my favorite images, I experimented extensively with various treatments, trying out high key, low key, HDR, color mapping, and exposure curves, like Warhol experimenting with variations on prints of soup cans. The results are abstract enough that you could almost get away with posting them on social media, challenging the AI censors to identify them for what they are. A perfect Captcha: prove you're not a robot by identifying the squares that contain genitalia.

All that's left is to plan the third photo shoot.