Helena Christensen likes to take nude photos of her friends.

Helena Christensen

Helena Christensen

The 49-year-old supermodel has had a love of photography from an early age and when she's not in front of the camera, she likes to play around with different lighting and photo subjects to capture the world from a "different angle".

Speaking exclusively to BANG Showbiz, she said: "I tend to shoot a lot of nature, and portraits of people, I photograph my girlfriends a lot. I love the female shape, I love skin, I love how light plays on bodies outside and I love flowers, but trying to capture everything from a different angle.

"I try to get [my friends] naked and into the freezing nature!"

The Danish beauty - who has 18-year-old son Mingus with her former partner Norman Reedus - admits that taking photos and starring in photos require two completely different types of "concentration", and whilst it's easy for her to lose herself in the moment as a model, she feels more pressure as the photographer.

She explained: "When I am taking photographs, It's a whole different kind of concentration because the responsibility is on you to create, and to do the job, you're doing the pre-work, you're doing the job, then you're doing post work and you have the responsibility of keeping everyone involved; the hair and makeup artists, the stylist, the magazine, the client and whoever you're working with so there's a lot of things going on at the same time whereas being a model I forget about all of it and concentrate on being in the moment."

And when it comes to her top photography tips, she says the key for a good photo is "lighting and composition" but she enjoys capturing spontaneous "moments" the most.

She said: "You can basically find beautiful light in any situation, with natural light or even with available light, play around with light coming from a lampshade. It's very interesting playing around with shadows and light play with images, and also composition, how you frame the image.

"But really at the end of the day, the most interesting pictures are moments that you just capture without even having thought about them first".