Nick Fancher -Cassie Eberle Under the Influence

 My “Under the Influence” artist is Nick Fancher. I really enjoyed the Night Prowler project we did with playing with lighting and long exposure composition, so I intentionally searched for an artist who uses similar methods. I chose Nick for his colorful compositions, comprised of human subjects and utilizing motion blur and long exposures layered on top of each other to make visually intriguing compositions.

Nick uses a lot of intense lighting in his portraits, both colorful and black and white. This use of lighting adds a lot of depth and intensity to the pieces. A lot of his work invokes feeling and thought as well, with motion, distortion, and focus on certain parts of the subject, such as the face or hands. Motion and movement is also a huge part of what makes up some of his compositions, and layering of these different photos on top of each other to create one flowing composition. He has a series on dance where he focuses a lot on showing that movement in long exposure. Part of his process is using minimal and affordable equipment, which is also great because that is all I have. Something he also mentions in a blog post he wrote is that you can do portrait photography anywhere. Diversifying your subject and background can add to the piece versus take away from it. He also teaches you how to create the illusion of an “invisible black” background, which is an amazing technique to achieve the intense lighting and shadows he creates.

As far as his subjects, he primarily does portrait photography and truly has a diverse subject pool. He photographs people of every background, every career path, from the famous to the mundane. He also changes between full body shots, partial body shots, and even to close detail shots of the face, hands, etc. His goal with his subjects is to emphasize things of the subject. He does also have a couple series of plant/flower photography and also one of commercial products, but I chose to focus on the portrait photography because I love the emotion the human body can portray and invoke with movement.