What lurks in the forest? Shak and Lakeisha

Steven Perdikis

I don’t photograph human beings nearly as much as I would like to. Perhaps one day it will be a full time endeavour of mine, but for the time being, its a way to express myself creatively and interact with others while educating them about the mind-numbingly complex dance of photons that enable photography.

One day I’ll write a whole bunch of stuff about that, maybe even making a video. Today is not that day. Today is the day that I will be sharing recent work I created with Shak and Lakeisha in the Southern part of South Australia in early November, 2021.

The below images are not shot in sequence, but re-order the day’s shoot into a narrative thread. Keen to see what people read from this tale.

Let the journey commence…

I like to depict the “damsel”, as a reminder that everything on this planet is held together with the most fragile of balances. By allowing people to witness this, frozen in time, I can share a story and a portion of the way with which I see the world, in the words of Walter Benjamin, talking about a Klee painting:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

These images were all shot using a Nikon Z6. While I have a variety of lenses at my disposal, this shoot only used three lenses.

  • Nikon Z 35mm f/1.8
  • Nikon Z 85mm f/1.8
  • Nikon Z 24-70 f/2.8

The 35 mm lens is quickly becoming my favourite lens for completing portrait work. It’s got a good working distance, enables you to capture head and shoulders shots at a somewhat comfortable working distance (owing to its ability to focus fairly close to the lens surface) – and it is very portable.

Images were lit using a variety of Godox products, with a hodge-podge collection of light modifiers.

  • 2x Godox AD200
  • 1x Godox TT685N
  • 1x Godox Umbrella Beauty Dish with Grid
  • 1x Neweer Shoot through Umbrella

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