“The coffee bean is broken down until it’s nothing but grinds and steeped in boiling water to produce a warm, rich, familiar drink. When you feel like your life is falling apart and you’re boiling in water, remember the coffee bean. “

M.L.R

A Fine Art Nude Photoshoot with Myrissa Lynn and Fresh Coffee Grounds

I had a blast working with Myrissa on this fine art nude photoshoot in my studio!

Myrissa came to me with an idea for a fine art nude photoshoot with coffee. When she asked, I immediately agreed and we set up a date and time, shared some “inspiration” photos. The benefit of Inspiration images and pinboards is, they are great to get everyone on the same page and get a rough idea of what we were going for. Myrissa wanted to use coffee grounds instead of beans. I thought this would look really good in black and white, like black sand. As result, I was intrigued from the get-go!

Lighting and Equipment

For my part, I wanted to use some classic lighting similar to that of Jay Meisel and painters of the renaissance art era. Alien Bees by Paul C. Buff are the brand of lights I use in the studio. From past experience, they have never failed me! The Canon 5D Mark IV body is my current camera and I used my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 “L” lens.

The Shoot

Myrissa met me at my studio on a Saturday afternoon and we collaborated on this set as she moved through a series of natural poses with some direction from myself, to produce a series of images of which a small collection can be seen below.

Post Processing

Everything I shoot I captured in Canon RAW (CR2) format. Canon has full color information embedded in the RAW file. The benefit of this if that, I get a great amount of tonal information to work with. The images are converted to black and white in post, using Adobe Lightroom’s settings management system and applied to all images before exporting. Finally, some minimal retouching in Photoshop and finally export in 4 sizes for publishing and promotion.

I need content for instagram/social media, one for my blog here at akeyphoto.com, a full resolution image as a JPG backup and finally, an 8.5×11 image for use for myself and models I work with to submit for publishing to industry magazines.

The Results

We hope you enjoy our artistic collaborations! Stay tuned for a future shoot with whole coffee beans as well!