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We open a most unusual gallery today for Ronan.  It is not work that we ever expected to see the light of day again as it represents the studio’s first commercial assignment.  It's a job that predates, actually, the founding of New Manhattan Studios.  We wound up pulling the files as part of our response to a request from Tye Briggs at Favorite Hunks. 

Starting with the New Year, FH is running a series with photographers reminiscing about the first time they had a nude model in front of their camera.  The clever reader can deduce what role Mr. Ronan might have played in the studio’s history, but for the story, you’ll have to head over to Favorite Hunks.

Ronan’s gallery will only be up for a limited period of time.  Dated as it is, it does not represent our current shooting and editing styles.  As such, think of it as part of our Fifth Anniversary celebrations, a brief look back at an historic artifact.  Ronan was a local body-builder who sought us out to take pictures for his application to be a dancer at Chippendale’s.  There’s more to the story, of course (and more pictures) at FH.

What digging into Ronan’s file taught us, again, is that we see things with a very different eye now.  I cannot go back into an old folder without wondering why I chose to edit the pictures I did.  Invariably I find images that interest me now but failed to catch my eye then.  It was fun, while in Ronan’s folder, to pull out a few newly-discovered images.  The gallery that opens today contains three such current edits of images that were captured prior to the studio’s opening in 2011.

The work we'll be posting in 2017 contains a goodly number of body-builders and gym rats as, increasingly, we train our cameras on the torso as our principal subject matter.  It is especially interesting, therefore, to revisit early physique models that we shot, searching through unedited files for hidden gems that catch our contemporary eye. 

While the external archive drive was plugged in, I seized the chance to pull a couple of new shots out of Karl Simon’s folder from 2012.  I was struck by how different the lighting and posing techniques were from the work done just a year earlier with Ronan.  It spoke volumes about the experience levels of both the models and the photographer.

Karl Simon (right) was named by DNA magazine as one of ten sexiest men of 2015.  Our work with the Scandinavian fitness model was done three years earlier when he was in his late 20s, babyface notwithstanding.  What I recall most from our session was that Karl had been up since 5:00 AM in Stockholm and had come to the studio directly from JFK.  He wanted to shoot on the roof, in front of the Empire State Building at night.  We shot until 11:00 PM, New York City time, by which point he had been up for 24 hours and looked none the worse for wear, as his photos show.  The new edits of Karl’s work can be found in the Recent Works section of the Fine Art Gallery. 

Over the next few months we plan to revisit some of our earlier sessions, searching for the elusive captures that slipped under our gaze the first pass through.  We’ll be sprinkling more into the Fine Art Galleries as we find them.

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