FRESH AND NEW: KHANH

June 14, 2013

I didn’t expect to find models in Lincoln, Nebraska. I especially didn’t expect to find a beautiful Asian muscle boy here. But sometimes when you’re not looking…

I’ve been working out at the Cooper YMCA in Lincoln since I got here about a year ago. I’ve seen some stunning boys in the gym. And Lincoln is way more ethnically mixed now than when I went to college here 40-plus years ago, so there’s a wide range of types.

I didn’t pursue it, though. It’s kind of a self-image thing: I just have never seen myself in model-search mode while I’m in Nebraska. This place has always been associated with family for me, and when visiting, I would revert to a more conservative, repressed me without even realizing it. Now that I’ve been here for a while, though, that’s been going away. (Perhaps this is just one more reason I’ve felt compelled to spend some time here at this point in my life–letting go of some more baggage I didn’t even know I was still carrying around.)

So gradually I’ve felt more open to finding models here, and there was one guy at the Y I kept noticing. He was young, Asian and had a really beautiful, muscular body…not too muscular, just right. Plus he had an open, fresh look, and a lot of energy. This kid doesn’t walk from place to place, he BOUNCES.

We had a gym relationship–you say hi because you work out at the same time and see each other several times a week. Then one day in the locker room, we had lockers next to each other and it was a natural thing to start a conversation. His name is Khanh, he’s Vietnamese, and he just turned 20. When he found out I was an artist, he wanted to know more, so I gave him my card and told him I thought he would be a good model, and to let me know if he was interested.

I wondered if he’d still be interested when he went to my website and saw that I specialize in male nudes. A few days later when I was working out, he came up to me and said he had seen my website and what did he have to do to be a model for me?

So we set up an interview. He came to my house (he showed up early, which is a good sign) and we talked and I took some test shots. He photographed well, which didn’t surprise me. And he had absolutely no problem with modeling nude. In fact, he was enthusiastic and excited about it.

I was enthusiastic and excited, too!

So with Khanh ready to model whenever I was ready for him, I turned my attention to the matter of a location. No beach, no jungle, no mountains…what was I going to do? I’ve always preferred tropical settings and that was obviously not an option. Plus, it was April and it was still cold and the trees were still mostly bare. On top of that, we kept having thunderstorms and rainy days, for weeks and weeks. It was a cold, wet spring, and every time we had a sunny day and I thought the weather would break, it would go right back to rain and cold.

A month passed, and I was getting impatient. Finally I decided I would shoot him right here, inside my house.

That wouldn’t really have been a very good option in the past, since I only use natural light, and most interiors are just too dark. In a situation like that you have to use a tripod and a very slow shutter speed to get sharp images, and that’s just not how I like to work.

But! A few months ago, in preparation for my trip to the Dominican Republic, I bought a new camera, a Canon Powershot G15. While I was traveling I discovered how amazing this camera is in low-light situations. There were times when the sun had gone down and it was almost completely dark outside, and I was still getting decent shots, with no flash.

I realized that with this new camera, I could actually do an interior shoot at my house with just ambient light.

Unfortunately the weather was still cloudy, rainy and dark. Even with my amazing new camera, I still needed it to be a sunny day outside to get the warm interior light I wanted.

But finally, after over a month of waiting, the weather broke. We had sun! I called Khanh and he was more than ready–he’d been impatient, too.

I wanted that magical late-afternoon light, and to get that in Hawaii I’d have to shoot from about 5pm to 6pm, any time of year. But here in North America, in late May/early June, we were getting that magical light for 2 whole hours, from about 6pm until 8pm or even later! So I had Khanh show up at my house at 530 and we started shooting.

Working with Khanh was a pleasure because he was so accommodating and enthusiastic–and so great-looking! Plus he has a bouncy, upbeat energy that makes any model even more appealing. All that, and magical light for a couple of hours! Need I say I got several hundred amazing shots?

One thing that surprised me was how well my house worked as a location. It’s a 1950s house with the moldings and fittings and the look that go with that era, and it has a really nice flavor I didn’t appreciate until this photo shoot. It’s a quiet setting, not obtrusive, but a nice ambience.

All things considered, it was probably one of the best interior shoots I’ve ever done. I would never have expected that.

Summer is arriving in full bloom as I write this, and sometime in the next few weeks I’ll do a second photo shoot with Khanh, probably outside, and when that happens I’ll be blogging about it. In the meantime, my creative juices always get bubbling on high when I have a new model to work with, so I’ve already begun producing drawings and prints of Khanh.

(You can see currently available art featuring Khanh here.)

Update: Now there’s a Khanh E-book!

In February 2014 I published an e-book called Khanh which contains over 100 uncensored photographs from both of my photo shoots with this beautiful model. You can purchase it for instant download here. It’s also available on CD. Look for shots of Khanh also in my e-book The Asian Male Nude Book Two.