Dan Kitchens
patreon
It's been a while!
🕑 Added 2023-10-18 01:27:25 +0000 UTCI didn't actually shoot with a model for three and a half years. Since leaving Los Angeles to relocate in the Japanese countryside at the Pandemic hit, I have had no way to continue this project. Models from the US couldn't travel to Japan for 2 and a half years from exactly the week I moved here. There is no similar scene here (the Japanese countryside is fairly conservative compared to the freedom of California), plus I do not speak the language so I cannot connect with models in Tokyo except perhaps for a very few who speak English. I had pretty much moved on from the idea of even continuing to shoot nudes to be honest.
Then I started to get some texts from some very close model friends in LA saying they were planning trips to Japan and wanted to come visit and come shoot. I was excited to see these friends again, but also felt pretty ambiguous about shooting. I was woefully out of practice - I don't really even take pictures intentionally anymore. Could I possible remember the skills needed or even muster up the interest to do full on shoots with a visiting model friend and make something useful to them? Of course I agreed to have them come stay with us, but I wasn't sure what to expect from shooting with them. I didn't even know WHERE to shoot around here. Unlike my life in LA, I hadn't spent time finding good places out in nature to have privacy, and wasn't sure if any of our friends with beautiful old Japanese farmhouses would let us shoot erotic/ nude photography in their homes/ places of business, given the relative wholesomeness of the region.
But my first guest, Eirenne, was coming to Japan for the very first time, so I tried to scramble to find some place to shoot in some very "Japanese" locations, as well as see her in some of my favorite places (and also take some funny "hot girl with car" shots with my new mini truck that happened to be delivered to my house just hours before her arrival from Tokyo.
In the end it was pretty much like old times! Shooting with her was always easy, fun and sexy, and she seemed really happy with the images we made together. It was also pretty fascinating to catch up after not seeing her since 2019. The Pandemic altered all our lives, (plus plus we are both just 4 years older) and it showed in her emotional state, life goals, and in changes to her body. I love to watch the ebb and flow in the physical and emotional state of my model friends over the years, and document it through the photos.
I still don't know how I feel about my photography project though - without a lot of like-minded people to collaborate with locally, its seems a lot of effort to continue it. It has felt very nostalgic to do a few days of shooting with a model friend, and spend some more days selecting and editing the images, but it definitely feels like it will be a smaller part of my life going forward, and that maybe I will just occasionally scratch this itch rather than being focused on it heavily. That being said, another model friend that I have been shooting for 10 years now arrived 2 weeks after Eirenne, so i got to try it out again sooner than I would have thought. We'll see...!
