I’m no good.  Let me put that out there right now, right this instant.  I am absolutely no good.

So I picked up a D90 back in January on something of a whim after I used Lawrence’s D90 during our midwest winter road trip just this last winter.  Just like enlisting into the Air Force, picking up photography has been something of a surprise hit for me.  Something I never thought I’d do somewhat seriously… I am now doing, somewhat seriously.

I love God’s Green Earth.  I love the soil, the sky, the light from the sun, and how the stars peek out of a dark sky on a clear night.  I also think the living things that wander this world are fascinating… trees, animals, and… people.  For the last few months, I’ve ventured out to take pictures of buildings and landscapes… things that don’t require a whole lot of coordination or communication.  This month, however, I decided to step the game up.  I joined a meetup group that organizes glamor photo sessions with models.  I pay a few bucks, and in exchange I get to shoot pictures of models and build a portfolio in a professional studio with guidance from a professional photographer, one Mr. Shad Ramsey of Red Door Photography in Bellevue, KY.  I also get to hang out with other photographers (and sometimes models) in various stages of professional amateurism and hear their stories and experiences.  I’ve been to 2 photo shoots and one instructional session, and boy have I learned.

Hah… you want to hear something funny?  You know what they say, about learning to swim by getting thrown into a pool?  As it was for me joining the Air Force to learn how to earn respect and wisdom from the ground up, so has it been for photography.  My first photo shoot?  Nude models.  3 girls.  My worry going in was that I would somehow not act right, but apparently I had nothing to worry about at all.  Once I did a little bit of research into the glamor discipline of photography, and how models and photographers relate to each other, and realized that it was all very professional, I had no problem going into that studio and behaving.  A nude model, for the time that she is being paid to pose, is simply a prop.  A significant, important prop, but a prop.  I don’t mean this in an objectifying way, but if I want her to put her arm at a certain bend to get a certain shot, then that’s what she will attempt to do… to the degree that she’s comfortable with, of course.  She’s naked because for that particular amount of time, that’s her job.  It’s all very professional (at least the way I’ve seen it done), and no one is treated like crap or disrespected.  Apparently street cred is king, which makes sense.  Models are typically girls, and from what I’ve seen photographers are typically guys, so I guess there’s that dynamic in there that no one wants to get taken out into the woods and “chopped up”, as one model remarked today.  Suffice it to say, when I realized that no one would do anything that would make me uncomfortable and vice versa, I was alright… for the most part.  For my first shoot, I really put myself at the mercy of the model as far as posing went.  I told them to do whatever it is they do, and that I had no idea what I wanted to see out of them while shooting pictures, so they just went for it, giving different looks and trying different poses as I snapped away.  (I’ve got the results posted up somewhere… let me know if you’d like to see them.)  I walked away with a few shots that I’d call mediocre at best; but hey, not bad for a first-ever photo shoot. With models. Whom were nude.

Today’s photo shoot wasn’t nude, and I think I was way more comfortable.  I shot a young girl who was posing for the first time and a model that I worked with during the nude shoot that came back for this one… Jess and Kelly, respectively.  I honestly felt bad for Jess today… she wasn’t nude or anything, but I had a feeling that she was rather uncomfortable modeling… I was wondering to myself what she was even doing there in the first place.  Kelly, on the other hand, is an amazing model… very easy to work with (i.e., “do what you want” yields great results, great for a noob photographer like myself that doesn’t know how to effectively communicate with models yet), and off the set she is quite personable, friendly, and–in my opinion–accessible in a way I wish more women were.  Aside from the models, today I tried one shot where I wanted the “sexy” to come from a display of confidence… unfortunately, I don’t think it worked out because I didn’t really get a chance to talk beforehand with the model in the shot, Jess.  Her timidity really didn’t work for me, because I’m kind of timid myself… so just picture model and photographer, both neophyte, both with no vision on what the final product will look like.  Yeah, I’m not blaming her, because I’m also to blame, in all honesty.  I guess there will always be next time.

And that’s that, that’s what I’ve been up to lately as far as weekend hobbies go.  Now that spring is here, I want to take another go at John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs and just generally doing all the shit that I’ve been stopping myself from doing.  I met up with Marjie again yesterday, and am going to try to get back into getting into shape, so I’ve got that going as well.  And politics… I’m going to look more into it.  I kind of want to meet the mayor of Dayton and hear how he did it.  But that’s for later.

Cheers.

-TJ