Exorcise Routine
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Exorcise Routine

Yesterday I shot with Katy and really leaned into creating dreamlike (nightmarish?) images. I’ve been experimenting with mylar for over a year now and continue to find new ways of interpreting the material. I love the soft reflection it offers, which give the photos a painterly quality. With the warping of the material, otherwise dreamy images turn into those depicting an exorcism.

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Creative Portraiture Workshop: New York City
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Creative Portraiture Workshop: New York City

It was great to be back in New York, teaching my two-day Creative Portraiture workshop. Photo god Lindsay Adler graciously lent me her Manhattan studio while she was off killing it in Milan. We had a blast experimenting with light, color, and technique.

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Gilding Lilies
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Gilding Lilies

I’ve never been especially fond of flowers. Don’t get me wrong— they’re pretty and everything, but I don’t stop to smell them, much less know their names. That said, flowers make wonderful subjects. They sit nice and still and always put on a great performance as I take my time fiddling around with lights, gels, and camera settings. Though I suppose any inanimate object would suffice for testing, I find flowers to have a human-like qualities to them. They have a face, a neck, and elegance for days. That’s not to say they’re an easy subject. They don’t bring anything to the table, save for their looks. They don’t have a range of dramatic poses or expressions or wardrobe changes. When working with flowers as a subject you only get out of a shoot what you put into it…

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Rae of Light
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

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.

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His and Hers
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

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…

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Shelby, July '19
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Shelby, July '19

I rarely go into a shoot with an agenda, but rather prefer to make it up as I go. I always wait to see what my subject will bring to the shoot, both literally and creatively. It helps when my subject is as good at posing and emoting as Shelby.

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Dreams Are Like Water
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Dreams Are Like Water

I’ve been experimenting with photographing reflections in mylar for four shoots now, and I’m finally starting to get the hang of it. In order to get a good range of movement in the mylar (which translates to warped reflections), I set up an oscillating fan nearby, and turned it on to the lowest setting. The effect ranges from minimal to so abstract that you can’t even tell what you’re looking at, so there’s a bit of luck involved. Every time the fan would pass over the mylar, it would ripple like pond water after a rock was tossed in, so I basically shot like hell and hoped for something good.

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Glow and Flow
Nick Fancher Nick Fancher

Glow and Flow

I’ve been shooting with the fungus-covered lens I bought off ebay for the past month. I find that I especially enjoy pairing the lens haze with warm lighting/toning, as you see above. Of course I can’t do any look or technique for very long before I find myself getting bored and wanting to move on to something else.

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