Rikasg in Playa del Carmen: The Lost Nude Photography Files
A nude photography session with Rikasg in Playa del Carmen almost disappeared forever after a failed backup erased the original files. These are the photographs that survived.
I first met Erika through Nina. Nina had met her during a photography retreat in Tulum, and after the retreat we stayed in touch, so when Erika came to Playa del Carmen, we decided to shoot together.
I didn’t have any big ideas or plans for the shoot, and there wasn’t anything particularly complicated about the production. We were staying in an Airbnb, so we used the space we had and turned it into a small shooting environment for the day. I photographed Erika nude and also filmed the session, working with the kind of simple setup I often prefer when the goal is to keep the attention on the model rather than the environment.
The photographs came out well. She really fit into the rustic natural vibe of the space and I was happy with what we got, so I moved on to the next shoot without giving them much more thought.
Then I deleted all the images.
I Thought I Had Lost Everything
A few months after we returned to the United States, I was going through my backups and managed to make one of those mistakes that every photographer hopes never happens.
I deleted the original files from our Mexico shoots. All of them.
I didn’t just lose a few photographs from this session. I lost a significant amount of work from that entire six month period, including photographs and video that I had assumed would always be sitting somewhere on a hard drive.
The original RAW files from the Rikasg shoot were gone.
Fortunately, there was one thing I hadn’t thought about at the time. Lightroom had generated previews of the photographs, and those previews were still inside the catalog.
They weren’t the original files, but they gave me something to work with.
I was able to recover a selection of the photographs from those Lightroom previews, which means the images on this page are not the original files I edited after the shoot. They are the versions I was able to save after the originals disappeared.
That’s why I’ve come to think of this collection as part of the Lost Mexico Files, and why they mean so much more to me now.
The Photographs That Survived
There is definitely something different about looking at these photographs now.
When I originally shot Erika, I was thinking about the photographs as part of a normal project. After losing the files, I started looking at them as a record of something that almost disappeared completely.
That changed their value for me.
I also had to accept the limitations of working from Lightroom previews. I couldn’t go back to the RAW files and start the edit over. I couldn’t recover information that wasn’t there. What survived was what I had.
Instead of trying to pretend otherwise, I decided to work with the photographs as they were.
The result is a collection that feels connected to the circumstances surrounding it. These aren’t perfect archival restorations, and they aren’t supposed to be. They are the photographs that survived a mistake that could have erased the entire shoot. That entire period of my creative life.
For me, that’s part of what makes them worth publishing.
Rikasg Nude Photography in Mexico
Erika is better known online as Rikasg, and that is the name associated with this collection here at Room Noir.
The shoot itself was created as nude art photography rather than as a conventional commercial modeling session. I wanted to photograph Erika as a subject and build the images around her presence, the available space and the way the light moved through it.
Playa del Carmen happened to be where we were living at the time, but the location isn’t really the point of the photographs.
Mexico provided the setting and the circumstances that brought the shoot together. The photographs are all about Erika.
Watch the Rikasg Behind the Scenes Video
I also filmed the shoot, so there is more to the story than just the photographs.
The video preview above gives you a look at the session and the process behind the images. The complete video is available to Room Noir members.
If you want to see the full video and the complete collection of surviving photographs from the shoot, become a Room Noir member.
The Complete Rikasg Gallery
The public gallery only shows part of the work.
Room Noir members can access the complete Rikasg gallery, including photographs that aren’t being published on the public site. The full collection gives the shoot more context and lets the photographs exist together as a body of work rather than as a handful of individual images.
This is one of the reasons I built Room Noir as a membership site in the first place. Social platforms are useful for introducing people to the work, but they aren’t a good place to present an entire nude photography project.
The complete collection belongs here.
Rikasg Fine Art Prints
A selection of photographs from the shoot is also available as fine art prints through the Room Noir shop.
There is something appropriate about turning these particular photographs into physical prints. The digital originals were lost, but the images themselves survived, and now some of them can exist outside of the digital archive altogether.
Looking Back at the Shoot
When I think about this session now, I don’t remember it as some elaborate production. I remember how easily it came together and how normal the day felt. Nina had met Erika in Tulum, we ended up in Playa del Carmen, and a few conversations later I was photographing and filming her in our Airbnb.
At the time, I had no reason to think I would ever have to worry about those photographs again.
That’s probably what makes losing them so frustrating. As photographers and creatives we spend so much time making images that we sometimes forget how fragile the archive actually is. A hard drive fails, a backup gets overwritten, a mistake gets made, and years of work can disappear in a few seconds.
This shoot was one of the lucky ones.
It survived because Lightroom happened to have previews.
The photographs that remain aren’t the complete collection I originally created with Erika, but they’re enough to tell the story of the shoot and preserve a small piece of that time in Mexico.
And after almost losing them completely, I’m glad they’re still here.
See More of Rikasg at Room Noir
If you found Room Noir while searching for Rikasg, Erika, nude modeling or nude photography, this is only the public part of her collection.
The complete Rikasg gallery and the full behind-the-scenes film are available to Room Noir members. Selected photographs are also available as fine art prints for collectors who want something from the series in physical form.
Model: Rikasg
Studio: Missfit Studios
Makeup Artist: Missfit Studios
Photography: Room Noir
Video: Room Noir
