Nick Fancher 9/28/22 Nick Fancher 9/28/22

Elastic Plastic: Exploring a New Material with Alayna

Here's some recent work with @a.bean.sprout. It's been a couple years since our last collaboration and was a great time of conversation and art-making. I especially had fun exploring shooting through a piece of plastic that my friend @davidtsigler salvaged from an old Mac monitor. The red in that first image is actually a warped reflection of the red shirt I happened to be wearing at the shoot. My mind is still pouring over the possibilities that this material affords me.

Nick Fancher 5/17/22 Nick Fancher 5/17/22

Stef's Aura

In this shoot I explored prisms and color and creating a glowing aura with Stef…

Nick Fancher 12/30/21 Nick Fancher 12/30/21

Colorful Long Exposure Portrait Shoot with Lily

It was a blast exploring color and motion and shapes with @humbleflowers for my final shoot of 2021…

Nick Fancher 12/7/21 Nick Fancher 12/7/21

Hair / Beauty Shoot with Chyna Tené

A few weeks ago my friend and frequent collaborator @chyna.tene stopped by my studio to hang out. She brought some of her crafting materials with her to work on some of her art while we chatted. We got to talking about hair and I showed her a book of hair portraits from J.D. ‘Ojeikere before suggesting that we do a similar, hair-themed session. She selected some jewels and I cut some strips of wire from her crafting materials and we styled her hair in several different ways. I used the @lindsayadler_photo x @westcottlighting Optical Spot and gobos to illuminate her in a variety of patterns. The whole shoot only took about 45 minutes but the act of creation and collaboration stuck with me for the rest of the day.

Nick Fancher 8/19/21 Nick Fancher 8/19/21

Images From My Creative Portrait Workshop

This past weekend I hosted a 2-day Creative Portrait workshop at my studio. In an effort to keep the atmosphere intimate and allow for a lot of hands-on time for students, I capped the workshop at 5 students. We covered a range of techniques such as using flags to shape light; color theory; making and using snoots; long exposure portraits; and lighting with projectors. We packed a lot in, as you can see below…

Nick Fancher 7/5/21 Nick Fancher 7/5/21

Water Drops, Light Painting, and Lens Fungus (Oh My)

When Lily arrived at my studio I decided to start off with some colorful water drop portraits before getting into the light painting…

Nick Fancher 6/24/21 Nick Fancher 6/24/21

Studying Time with Multiple Exposures

For the last week I’ve been working on creating content for a chapter about in-camera multiple exposures, which will be included in my upcoming book, The Creative Portrait. @yungallyce graciously popped by my studio and patiently waited as I worked through a number of different techniques…

Nick Fancher 3/15/21 Nick Fancher 3/15/21

Kind of Blue: Exploring Black Masculinity with Khalil

Khalil and I had been planning this shoot for the better part of a year. He reached out to me last June and said he had an idea for a shoot that he wanted to explore. He knew that he wanted to use chains in the images as well as explore themes of black masculinity. When he arrived at my studio one morning last month and began to lay out the chains that he brought with him, I immediately recognized that we’d need much more to really make the images work. I suggested that we make a quick run to the hardware store, and he agreed. We ended up leaving the store with every inch of chain that they had…

Nick Fancher 2/16/21 Nick Fancher 2/16/21

Color and Shape Collab with Larry Robertson

Larry Robertson is a clothing designer, stylist, poet, and many other things. Everytime we collaborate we walk away with fire. He came by my studio yesterday and brought with him a bunch of outfits. We vacillated between shooting and chatting, discussing life, creativity, and navigating the ever-changing world…

Nick Fancher 2/5/21 Nick Fancher 2/5/21

Exquisite Geometry

This was my first time working with Amber. In preparation for the shoot I told her the same thing I tell all of my models: bring 4-6 different outfit options and have hair and makeup ready when they arrive. Once she arrived we looked through the items that she brought and decided a direction for the shoot based on what we had to work with. I love the improvisational element in test shoots. It can really take my shoots in new directions. It makes me wonder if this is what it feels like tobe a jazz musician, going in loose and riffing off the other collaborators…

Nick Fancher 1/11/21 Nick Fancher 1/11/21

Plants and Plastic with Chyna

I’ve collaborated with Chyna a dozen times now, and we’ve since become friends. She recently came by the studio and we chatted about work, life, and plants, among other things. I had recently propagated one of my plants by splitting it into two pots, one of which I gave to her. Before she left I asked if she would want to do an impromptu shoot with her new green friend. After snapping a few frames with the plant I convinced her to let me shoot some colorful long exposure images…

Nick Fancher 12/25/20 Nick Fancher 12/25/20

Elegance of Form

I kept it simple in this shoot with Angela. No fancy camera or lighting techniques. Just focusing on mood and form…

Nick Fancher 11/15/20 Nick Fancher 11/15/20

Shutter Drag with Window Light / Creating Dappled Light with DIY Reflector

I wanted to create a dappled light effect, similar to sunlight reflected off of windows. I actually came across this effect by accident. I bought some mirror stickers used for crafting, which I adhered to a piece of cardboard. I had scored the cardboard on the back which made it an easy-to-carry tri-fold reflector. The happy accident came about in that the corrugated cardboard texture created the dappled light effect when lit with a bright light source, in this case a flash…

Nick Fancher 10/19/20 Nick Fancher 10/19/20

Collaboration with Clothing Designer Xuena Pu

This was a deceptively simple shoot. Designer Xuena Pu makes garments with bold shapes, so I decided to make a range of basic shapes in Photoshop which I projected onto fabric behind the model. I made the shapes orange and chose to light the model with a complementary color of cyan. I used a softbox to create even, flattering light, making to add a grid to in order to avoid overlighting the backdrop. I then posed Dajia so that her lines (or lines from the garment) either aligned or broke out of the projected shapes.

Nick Fancher 8/28/20 Nick Fancher 8/28/20

Liquid Color

This was a fun little test shoot with Jona. For some of the frames I projected video footage onto her and made multiple exposures. Other frames I used a pulsing, multicolored LED and had Jona do the moving. There was an element of control and chaos in each scenario, and all of them led to discovery and delight.

Nick Fancher 6/23/20 Nick Fancher 6/23/20

New Work with Chyna (plus LIMITED EDITION BOOK AND PRINT SALE)

I’ve shot with Chyna at least a dozen times over the past four years and always come away with stunning imagery. My latest shoot with her last month was no exception.

Nick Fancher 1/3/20 Nick Fancher 1/3/20

Waiting, Watching

When I was teaching at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops last August I had the fortune of sitting in on a presentation given by Tony O’Brien. During the talk he discussed his photo series, Light in the Desert, wherein he spent a year living with and photographing monks in a monastery. He described how he had waited seven months before he even picked up his camera to take a picture. He wanted to earn the trust of his subjects before attempting to capture their image. It absolutely blew my mind. That level of patience and intentionality is unheard of. No one had directed him to wait that long. No one was watching him to make sure he captured his subjects with honesty and integrity. It was apparent to me that this is the way he lives his life and in turn also carries out his photography work. All that is to say is that I’ve been working a lot on modeling my life after a slower, more intentional way of living…

Nick Fancher 12/13/19 Nick Fancher 12/13/19

Fantastic Plastic

Chyna popped by my studio last week to update her digitals. Of course I couldn’t let her get away that easily...

Nick Fancher 12/6/19 Nick Fancher 12/6/19

Rae of Light

Rae is a dancer with Balletmet and a frequent collaborator with me. She’s as willing to experiment as she is talented, which means we always come away with a great range of images. We started off by creating fragmented portraits courtesy of my broken mirror, before moving on to creating golden images with slow shutter speeds and mylar reflections.

Nick Fancher 10/29/19 Nick Fancher 10/29/19

His and Hers

This was a fun one. Chyna and I have fallen into a nice rhythm with our shoots, as we have been collaborating every 2-3 months. It goes like this: she shows up with several outfits that she cobbled together from her closet or the thrift store; I look over what she brought and quickly brainstorm how to best light/shoot the looks; we play…