#8 - Body Profile with Sung Bird

A few months ago I was contacted by my friend Sick Boy and his girlfriend Sung Bird. Sung’s a pilates instructor, and she was looking to do a body profile shoot to market her business. If you’re not familiar with body profiles, they’re an increasingly popular (here in Korea at least) way for people to show off the results of all their hard work in the gym. Think portrait, but where the face and body share the stage. “Korean photographers all make the photos sexy. I don’t want sexy. I want strong,” was Sung’s sole direction.

I gathered several lighting references, and we decided between ourselves on 3 primary set ups. Sung had been preparing for months before the shoot, perfecting a variety of poses and toning her body, and it showed. My concerns as to how to light the shoot to best show her muscles and form were needless; she’d done the hard work for me.

With the help of a friend of hers who ran a kind of quality-control check on her poses (adjusting a hip here and a shoulder there) we cycled through pose after pose requiring a ton of core strength and endurance. Sung was clearly determined to be in peak shape for this shoot.

It turned out to be a more physically demanding shoot for me than I expected. Much of it was shot from the floor, propped up on my elbows or on one arm. More than once Sung broke the pose after getting the shot, and my groans of exhaustion eclipsed her own. That’s one of the many things I love about photography though: at the best of times it’s a physically demanding job that satisfies the part of me that wants work to feel like work.