Nick Fancher 6/23/24 Nick Fancher 6/23/24

Multiple Exposure Portraits with Roarie Yum

My studio is located within @thefort614, which is a 130 year old warehouse on the south side of Columbus. It used to be the home of the Seagrave Company, which used the space to manufacture fire engines and other rescue vehicles, for over 60 years. Every square inch of the building has a glorious patina that can’t be faked. The cracked plaster, distressed flooring, and sun-faded glass is something especially rare in this fast growing city, populated with new builds…

Nick Fancher 5/5/24 Nick Fancher 5/5/24

Multiple Exposure Portraits with Rigid Textures

Last year I explored fluidity quite a bit in my work, and this year I’ve been gravitating towards rigidity. To create these images I wandered around taking photos of a range of textures, which I used as a base layer to make in-camera multiple exposures in two portrait sessions.

Nick Fancher 3/31/24 Nick Fancher 3/31/24

Micro and Macro with Katy

I had a wildly varied session with @cortadh0e last week…

Nick Fancher 3/15/24 Nick Fancher 3/15/24

Kinstugi and the Art of Self-Care: Adult Survivor of Childhood Abuse

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing a broken vessel with a precious metal, such as gold or platinum. A repaired vessel isn’t the same as it was before the trauma, nor is it diminished. The essence of the original vessel is still there, but golden scars now trace the lines where the fracture occurred…

Nick Fancher 9/26/23 Nick Fancher 9/26/23

Less Is More: Slowing Down with Sondos

Lately I’ve been intentionally slowing down the pace in which I engage life. Though I’ve never been good at being still or meditating, I have found lately that stillness is what I’ve been craving the most. My favorite pastime these days is to sit in what others might call silence and listen to the sounds of the world around me. Crickets chirping; the wind moving through the trees; jets passing overhead; neighbors listening to a ball game on their porch radio. If I can manage to stop thinking about each individual sound, I can start to hear them all as one, and accept my place within it.

Nick Fancher 7/19/23 Nick Fancher 7/19/23

The Negative Side of Social Media : Commissioned by Unsplash

As some of my longtime followers know, I’ve had a complicated relationship with social media. In 2019 I was experiencing so much anxiety that I permanently deleted all of my accounts (60,000 followers over 3 platforms) with no plans to return. I spent the next year off the grid. Though I’d already been in therapy for years I also began going to a support group for adult survivors of childhood abuse (ASCA). I started climbing and began regularly cycling again. The combination of processing trauma, moving my body, and removing myself from situations and relationships that exacerbated my anxieties, I began to heal…

Nick Fancher 6/29/23 Nick Fancher 6/29/23

Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers for Los Angeles Times

Flea has a new podcast called “This Little Light”, on which he interviews a broad range of people from the music industry such as Patti Smith, Earl Sweatshirt, and Rick Rubin, thus mirroring his own diverse taste in music. When Calvin Alagot asked me to make portraits of Flea for the Los Angeles Times, I began thinking of different techniques that I could employ in an effort to reference the breadth and length of Flea’s career as well as his influence in the music world.

Nick Fancher 8/29/22 Nick Fancher 8/29/22

Images From My Latest Creative Portrait Workshop

Last week I taught a two-day photography workshop called The Creative Portrait. I taught my students a range of innovative camera and lighting techniques that allow them to capture subjects in creative ways. Here are a few of my favorite images from the weekend.

Nick Fancher 5/4/22 Nick Fancher 5/4/22

Images From the Creative Portrait Workshop: April 2022

This past weekend I taught a Creative Portrait workshop to five students, at my Columbus studio. I’ve been teaching workshops for over a decade now, and each time I teach one I tweak the format a bit, which keeps it interesting for me and my students. My work is constantly evolving and so I like to work a couple of my newer techniques into each workshop. I typically teach 8 core techniques, each of which can be executed in a number of different ways, each producing radically different results. Here’s what I taught, this time…

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 5/17/21 Nick Fancher 5/17/21

A Fixed Point in Space Over Time: Photo Shoot with Ballet Dancer Kristie Latham Zurmehly

In my art my go-to techniques all center around the passage of time. Take this shoot with Kristie, for example. I made long exposures and multiple exposures in order to observe how she moved through a fixed point in space over time, which I otherwise wouldn’t be able to see with my naked eye…

Nick Fancher 4/30/21 Nick Fancher 4/30/21

Owning My Scars

I was born with a condition called sagittal craniosynostosis. It basically means that part of my skull was prematurely fused and lacked the soft spot needed for head growth. It’s a fairly common defect but if it goes untreated it can cause deformity, seizures, or even death. Though I now know how lucky I was to be able to receive that surgery, I grew up ashamed of my scar. As many of you can likely identify with, anything that makes you stand out from other kids makes you a potential target to bullies. I was called so many names as a kid that I feared ever having my hair cut short…

Nick Fancher 3/18/21 Nick Fancher 3/18/21

From the Archives: Underoath, Erase Me Photoshoot (Behind the Scenes)

In January of 2018 I met up with the fellas from Underoath in Los Angeles to shoot photos for their yet-to-be-released album, Erase Me. My friends at Tension Division were designing the album and merch and basically every facet of the upcoming album cycle. Not only did I need to shoot individual photos of each member using several different in-camera techniques such as multiple exposure, shutter drag, and projector for the album art, but I also needed to shoot promo photos for Spotify and images for an upcoming issue of Alternative Press. The shot list was aggressive for a one-day shoot but I had the added challenge of shooting all this in the living room of an Airbnb while Brandon, the creative director, was remotely directing everything from their home in Ohio. It was a tall order but I was up for it…

Nick Fancher 12/29/20 Nick Fancher 12/29/20

The Thin Red Line

I met Maya several years ago when I was shooting her senior fashion show collection at CCAD. When she me post some images from my trauma series she reached out and asked to participate...

Nick Fancher 9/30/20 Nick Fancher 9/30/20

New Photo Tutorial (Creative Portrait #3)

I’m excited to announce that I just dropped the third episode in my ongoing tutorial series, The Creative Portrait. It covers ten scenarios with each scenario showing real-time raw file capture, camera settings, and color grading in Lightroom.

Nick Fancher 9/24/20 Nick Fancher 9/24/20

Back to Life: Opioid Recovery Campaign for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources

Back in June I drove down to West Virginia with my assistant Seth to shoot portraits of two different subjects who have recovered from opiod addiction for the state Department of Health and Human Resources. I was working alongside a video crew (who was shooting a tv-spot) and under the direction of the agency Fahlgren Mortine to create multiple exposures showing the subject’s new life without chemical dependency as part of the Back to Life campaign.

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 7/6/20 Nick Fancher 7/6/20

Trauma Portraits (Series)

In 2017 I began a series exploring trauma. I invited participants to come share their story with me, which was followed by a brief portrait session. I had subjects gather several images (or a video) that represented a time of significant trauma in their lives, which they brought to my studio to share with me. When they arrived we took some time to sit and discuss their story. After chatting I took the imagery they brought, loaded it into a slideshow, and projected it onto them while I created multiple-exposure portraits. As the photographic layers began to stack up, the projected images of trauma became less and less recognizable and only the colors and fragmented shapes remained. Old photos representing terror and loss began to disintegrate. Scars transformed into beauty marks, wounds and wholeness inextricable.

Nick Fancher 3/27/20 Nick Fancher 3/27/20

All Things to All Men

This shoot with Dustin had a bit of something for everyone. I used a projector for most of the scenarios, using it in combination with a range of different camera techniques. I made in-camera multiple exposures, using different blending modes. I explored using slow shutter speeds, both by moving my hands as well as zooming my camera lens. Finally, I fired up a fog machine and projected different images through the smoke. There really are endless ways to use such a simple tool…