My Suicide Girls Debut

I have been a fan of the Suicide Girls concept for years. I always loved the way it gave models with a certain look and style a platform and a community. Back when it first launched more than 20 years ago, models with lots of tattoos and piercings were very much part of a subculture that did not have mainstream appeal. Of course, over the years that alternative look has become far more mainstream & SG has grown & grown. I gather that these days it's becoming harder and harder to find models without at least one tattoo.

When I started becoming comfortable shooting lingerie and nudity levels with models, I set myself a personal (and at the time secret) goal to maybe one day have a set of images on that platform, and today I achieved that goal with this set going live on Member Review yesterday! And on my birthday too (purely a happy coincidence)!

I will be forever grateful to Helena for the trust she puts in me to shoot her in this way. Even before our first shoot together she had broached the idea of us some day doing a set for SG - we had chatted a lot online for more than a year before our first shoot, and that rapport we built, along with the images I was producing and the lovely comments other models were making about me, made her feel safe and like she could trust me. Because shooting a set like this takes a lot of trust, from both parties.

There is a misinformed belief among many models that to post a set on SG, it has to involve open leg shots. This is not the case - the minimum SG expect from a set is bare boobs and bum. However, when shooting a set, even if the other private areas are not in the images, the photographer sees everything!

Since shooting this set with Helena I shot two more sets, with my friend Sophia Dempsey, who had long loved the SG aesthetic and concept but didn't want her more private parts shown in images on the internet. Once I explained that this did not need to be the case, she was very keen to give it a try, and one of those sets goes live on the site in about six weeks (the queue to enter Member Review is approximately 3 months!!!).

Sadly due to SG rules, I can only show you a very small number of the images from my shoot with Helena, but if any of you are SG members you can see the full set here.

This style of shoot is not going to take over from my main styles of photography. For one ting, editing a set of 40-60 images takes quite some time, even with the lighter level of retouching that SG expect. Plus as I said, it takes a higher level of trust, so at the moment I feel I would only be comfortable shooting this style with a model I have shot with before, or who I have chatted with over some time online. It is also difficult to find decent locations without spending a fair amount of money. SG do not want studio style sets, they ask for a lifestyle setting, be it indoors or outdoors. And they prefer sets created using natural light. Confession... this et was produced using my Aputure continuous LED light with a strip box. Helena has a lovely window in her room, but it looks out onto a village green, and as such she has to have a blind covering the lower half of it when she is shooting. I'm really happy with how I lit it though... not quite like natural light, but near enough for me!