Active Lifestyle with Andrea
The best laboratory is a free afternoon with someone you already trust.
Andrea Paramesti and I had worked together commercially before, so when I reached out about doing something personal. Something without a brief or a deadline or a client on the other end of the phone, the conversation was short. She's an active lifestyle enthusiast. I wanted to study movement. It was, as these things sometimes are, an obvious match.
The concept centered on something I'd been wanting to push further: mixed light. Specifically, combining coloured LEDs with flash in a way that captures motion not in post, not through compositing, but directly in camera. The idea is straightforward enough to explain and genuinely difficult to execute well. Flash freezes. Continuous light, the LEDs, records whatever happens during the exposure. If the talent moves while the shutter is open, that movement burns into the frame as a trail, a blur, a ghost of the action. The frozen moment and the motion exist simultaneously in the same image. One frame, two truths.
Getting that balance right requires a particular kind of patience. Too much flash and the movement disappears. Too little and the frozen moment loses its anchor. The colour temperature of the LEDs whether you're working with cool blues, warm ambers, hard reds, shifts the entire feeling of the image. Each setup was its own small experiment: change the ratio, move the light, ask Andrea to push the movement further or pull it back.
Andrea, for her part, gave everything. She has a physical intelligence that makes direction almost redundant. You describe what you want and her body simply finds it. The athleticism is real, which means the movement in the frames is real, which means the blur trails are honest rather than decorative.
We covered a lot of ground. Clean studio light against deep blacks. Saturated colour fields with motion halos. Monochrome work that stripped everything back to form and shadow. Each approach revealed something different about the same subject. How a body in motion holds its shape, where grace lives inside effort, what light does when it chases something that won't stay still.
No client, no deliverable. Just the work, and how good it felt to do it.
- Arza Nursatya, advertising photographer. HIRA Imaji, Jakarta