I knew that when I started this whole operation there would be challenges. I had hoped that I could just start my little Substack, build up a subscriber base, convert some of them into paying customers, and live happily ever after. That was Plan-A. I think I’m now somewhere around Plan-F.

I had originally chosen SmugMug to host my full resolution images so that I could easily offer paying subscribers access to those files (plus prints if they wanted to order them) and so that I could sell the same images as one-time purchases to people who don’t want to pay monthly. I had read their terms of service and thought that my content would be perfectly within bounds. I even paid for a live Zoom call with one of their reps who helped me to think through the best implementation for my purposes and got me started with organization on the platform. He saw all of my content and didn’t have a word to say about it being potentially out of bounds.

Then, just a couple months later, I got a rather pointed email from SmugMug’s content police, saying that several of my images violated their terms of service and that I had 72 hours (!) to take down the offending images or risk deactivation of my account. The email did not point out the problematic files, but simply repeated the verbiage of the content policy with the pertinent parts in bold. (As if the change in font somehow made the policy clearer.) I proactively went through dozens of folders of images and deleted anything that I thought might be in violation, only to be told a few days later that my portfolio still contained disallowed content. After a few more exasperated emails, their rep eventually pointed out several files that were not allowed, one of which was this one:

I dunno, man. These things are subjective, but I wouldn’t put this kind of image on the provocative end of the spectrum. At this point I realized that there was no sense in fighting any longer - SmugMug was not going to be the best place for me to host my images. I gave up on offering prints and hastily cobbled together a solution so that I could at least keep offering what I had promised my paying subscribers (and still offer one-time downloads to non-subscribers): sidestack.io. Created specifically to help Substack writers offer digital downloads, it was a decent enough solution to keep providing my images to you, the readers. (It isn’t perfect, mind you - it requires that I charge 50 cents for downloads even to my paying customers, because it doesn’t have a way to offer things for zero dollars.)

And then, the nail in the coffin.

A few weeks ago I got another pointily-worded email, this time from Stripe, the integrated payment processing service for Substack. My business, according to the message, falls into the category of “restricted and prohibited”, which means that Stripe will not process payments for my publication if it involves “adult content”. I tried to appeal and plead my case, but a rejection came back almost immediately.

Substack does not offer any other integrated payment processors to handle subscription fees, so this means that I am unable to monetize my newsletter directly through this platform. (It will mean the same, surely, for any other authors who produce content similar to mine.) I don’t really have time to wait around for Substack to fix this (if they even intend to), so I’ve decided to handle all of my paid content on Patreon instead.

A quick clarification on what this does not mean.

I’m not shutting down Naked Prose or even drastically changing how I run things. I will still post model shoots twice a month and offer an abbreviated look at each one for free to everyone. Subscribers will still get these in their email inboxes as always. This also means that everyone will be able to comment on all of my articles again, something that I lamented the loss of when I enabled paid subscriptions.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the upside of moving paid content to Patreon. It’s a well-established platform that is better in many ways for what I want to offer anyway, and I will be taking advantage of those new opportunities. You might be asking why I didn’t just use Patreon from the beginning. Fair question! In hindsight I probably should have, but I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, and being able to do everything here on Substack with one platform was very appealing to me. It is more work to have to manage content in two places instead of one, but the simple solution has now been taken away.

So, what happens now?

First of all, paid subscriptions for this Substack have been paused. If you’re a paying subscriber, you will not be billed for any future months. People who paid for a full year up-front will get prorated refunds. There won’t be any future paywalled content here on the Substack site.

I have posted my latest photoshoot writeup (with Ana, if you haven’t read it yet) in the new format here on Substack as usual and the complete version as my first post on Patreon. If you’re a paying subscriber (thank you!) and want to keep seeing all of my work, you’ll have to sign up over there. You can use this button if you missed the link at the top:

Support Me on Patreon

Patreon allows me to offer quite a bit more to my subscribers, so I have already thought about what to do differently. At the moment, there is just one base tier, called Patron of the Arts, which entitles you to the following:

• Access to complete writeups for my professional model shoots, still posted twice per month

• High resolution downloads of the full image set (at no additional cost)

• The ability to comment on posts and chat with other subscribers

• Input into future posts and shoots

I have also started shooting additional content that I will make available in the future in a higher tier, called Behind the Lens. Subscribers at this level will have access to the following content, in addition to the basic tier:

• Behind-the-scenes photos and videos of the shoot

• Gear talk explaining what I used for the shoot and why

• Image editing tutorial videos with RAW images to edit yourself

• My evaluation of what went well in the shoot and what could have gone better

I wasn’t grabbing BTS content in all of my previous shoots, so I can only offer these things in the future. Once I have enough shoots documented in this new way, I will start offering this higher tier for those who are interested. Looking at my current shooting schedule, I’d say this is probably a few months down the road.

It’s going to take some time to repost all of my shoots at Patreon, but I’m already working on it. Eventually everything that is already on this site will be posted in full over there, and the posts here will be converted to the free format.

Thank you, as always, for reading, liking, commenting, sharing, following, and subscribing. I hope this is the start of a new and prosperous chapter for Naked Prose. I’ve learned too much to quit now, so I’ll continue to roll with the punches and come out stronger on the other side. Hopefully I’ll see many of you there.

Sincerely,

The Naked Prose guy

Do you know the “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” meme? Created as a flippant commentary on the bourgeoning internet in 1993, it turned out to be profoundly prophetic in ways that the original New York Times cartoonist never envisioned. “What does this have to do with naked women?” I hear you asking. If someone were to update the meme for 2025, it might read, “on the internet, nobody knows you don’t speak English.”

This is generally a good thing; technology has allowed us to transcend language barriers and communicate nearly without limit. As a resident of Hong Kong who doesn’t read Chinese, I rely on Google translate just to get by in my day-to-day life. “What does this have to do with naked women?” you ask again, growing annoyed and impatient. Today’s lovely model, Ana from Brazil (new country and continent!), doesn’t really speak English, a fact that I only learned when we were face-to-face before our shoot.

As an anglophone photographer living in southeast Asia, I’m used to at least some level of language barrier in my interactions with models. I’ve been pretty fortunate so far, in that I’ve never really worked with a model whose English was severely lacking. (Update: Since I wrote this writeup several months ago, I have in fact done shoots with zero-English models. Those stories are still to come!) When all of the setup for a shoot takes place over email, WhatsApp, or Instagram messages, each party can just use translation apps to communicate freely and clearly. Again, this is a good thing, especially when hammering out the details and expectations of working together. We don’t want to be talking past each other and get a nasty surprise on the day of the shoot. In this case, though, my communication with Ana led me to believe that her English was perfectly serviceable to get us through the day’s work.

I suppose I don’t know for certain that it isn’t, to be fair. But when I met her outside the studio on this crisp autumn morning in Milan, she spoke almost exclusively in Italian, and expressed that this was her preference. (She’s been living in Italy for many years and is married to an Italian man, to clarify. Her first language is Portuguese.) She did ask if I spoke “a little Italian” in our correspondence, and I admitted that I do. Still, I wasn’t expecting to conduct the entire shoot in a second language.

You go to war with the model you have, not the model you want, as Sun Tzu said.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Ana, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

As it turns out, there are two main ways to snag these killer venues. You can find a poorly guarded one and sneak in – very exciting, not recommended – or you can book a studio that has a room made up to look like this. I’ll let you all guess which one I did.

So I’ve got the venue, just need the model. (Re)enter Nastya, the feisty Ukrainian from the shoot in the yellow room a few months back. Turns out she’s relocated to Asia, where she prefers to do her modeling work. (The photographers in this part of the world, she says, are much more courteous than those in Europe. And better photographers.) Ok, so now I’ve got the venue and the model. Knowing Nastya as I do from our first shoot, I didn’t stress about the details. I showed her the venue ahead of time, so she arrived with wardrobe and ideas readymade for our surroundings.

She scampered off to do her hair and makeup while I surveyed the space, trying to formulate a basic plan of action for our two-hour session. I don’t know why I bother doing this, especially with a model like Nastya, because for the next two hours I basically followed her around with a camera while she worked her mojo. She’s very creative and needs little direction, so once we got rolling, all I needed to do was signal when it was time to move on to something different, and she’d oblige.

Model, then, not a problem. Lighting in the venue? Also not a problem. An abundance of late-morning sunshine streamed in on two sides, rendering every inch of the space perfectly useable even to an available-light-snob like me. The room was otherwise only sparingly appointed but still offered plenty for our purposes – a couple different chairs and stools for Nastya to crawl around on and, mercifully, a ladder for me to get some elevated perspectives.

Nastya emerged freshly coiffed and commenced the pre-shoot show-and-tell. She produced a handful of lingerie items and other adornments, all monochrome. A pair of black heels and some sheer stockings rounded out her accessory arsenal. “These, we can destroy,” she said of the latter. Destruction is very befitting of our sparse, ruined surroundings, and Nastya strikes me as the sort of woman who is quite handy at destruction, so I offered not a word of objection.

She donned the destructible stockings, and off we went. I couldn’t resist getting a few of those ultrawide shots at the beginning, so I stood far back and made Nastya just a part of the scenery. I revisited that wide perspective a few other times during the shoot, but I found myself picking up the tighter 25-50mm zoom way more often than I usually do. The wide-open space, free from obstacles, afforded me more working distance than I’m used to having, so I could use the extra reach of the longer focal lengths and still keep Nastya framed however I wanted.

She was ready to start tearing through those stockings, so I got closer and let her get a little aggressive. She found ripping them to be a bit more difficult than she had anticipated, so she ordered me to fetch a pen as a stabbing instrument. After a prolonged and thorough Swiss-cheesing of the stockings, Nastya grabbed, pulled, and tore at them with both hands while I did my best to capture the carnage. Mission accomplished, she discarded them, and we moved on.

I wanted to shoot with the leather chair next, but Nastya spotted a wood and metal stool and fancied working with that. She grabbed the white button-down shirt you see above, and we shot a nice little series against the bare concrete wall. Once she had worked that shirt on, around, and finally off of herself, I suggested we make a move to the leather chair. She took the opportunity to update her look, putting her hair up and grabbing a pair of glasses (which happened to be her boyfriend’s, too big for her, and kept falling off) and her black heels. This was about as playful as she got during the session, as she channeled naughty secretary vibes and posed with a pen and paper.

On the whole I would say that this session comes across as considerably more serious than the last one. I think that’s ok, as the venue suits her intense gaze and demonstrative posing, but it definitely adds a palpable intensity to the photos. Nastya is quite professional when she works, in that she’s very focused and determined. Her dark brown eyes can be quite penetrating when they find the lens, and I didn’t ever ask her to dial that back. I’m confident you can all handle it!

I do really find it enjoyable to work with models like Nastya who have big personalities and want to give themselves over fully to the shoot. I was thinking about this on the way home, actually – just how spontaneous and open-ended my shoots always turn out to be. I’m sure there are photographers out there who meticulously plan every aspect of a shoot and obsess over every detail - the wardrobe, the pose, the hair and makeup, the background, the lighting. That kind of process can produce stunning results, no doubt. But that’s just not my style. I’d rather book an energetic little Ukrainian lass, let go of the reins for two hours, and capture whatever happens. Hopefully it works!

What did you think of this shoot compared with the last one? There’s a good chance I’ll be able to work with Nastya again in the future - stick around and be sure not to miss it.

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Nastya's Full Shoot

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution as a part of their subscription. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

It’s a cliché to say to someone that they ought to write a book, so I didn’t say it to Natasha after our shoot today. She should totally write a book, though. Born in Russia but raised in southern Italy, she speaks several languages and has something of a checkered past (and the ill-conceived tattoos to prove it). She fled the coop at 18 and never looked back, a decision that saw her briefly homeless before someone discovered her natural propensity for modeling. Tall, blonde, striking – it was an inevitability, wasn’t it?

She reminded me of someone famous, but it took me a minute to put my finger on it. “Uma Thurman!” I finally realized. She gets this all the time, she says, but to her chagrin, as she doesn’t find Uma particularly pretty. “Ok so you’re like a prettier version of her,” I offer, worried I’ve already managed a faux pas within the first fifteen minutes of meeting her, but it doesn’t sour the mood.

And what a mood it is. This is the second shoot I’ve had here in Milan in two days, and technically at the same studio, but this time at the main location, which has many more shooting spaces and is busy with the sights and sounds of other creatives doing their thing. The hallways are flanked by rolls of seamless paper in every color, rigging contraptions, softboxes, flash units, moveable white and black walls – all things I have no use for as a weirdo obstinately shooting with natural light.

But the studio has got plenty of that, too: three huge windows, northwest-facing, let in all the light I’d need for the day. Imposter syndrome has never struck me harder than in this moment, as I’m in a studio in Milan, surrounded by working industry professionals, staring at a very tall and very well-established (277k followers on IG 😳) model. I don’t feel like I belong here, not even slightly - I am an interloper, a dauber, a dilettante. Doesn’t matter – I grab the camera and go about my business anyway.

Natasha, with all of her experience, was as professional and capable as I expected, but unexpectedly chatty and warm. She was as curious about me as I was about her, and it made transitions between shooting sets quite comfortable and natural. When she mentioned that she’s looking to get an apartment in Rome, I admitted that I don’t really like Milan and would much rather be a bit further south. “Nobody likes Milan,” she declared. “We’re all just here for work!” Good, I’m glad I’m not the only one! Milan is fine – it has all of the default charm that any Italian city has by virtue of being full of Italians, with their countertop espressos and pizza and pasta and gelato, but it has no heart, no soul of its own. There’s money and panache in spades, but a surfeit of tourists and not much of old Mediolanum, the ancient Roman name. “It’s Milan now, actually,” I can almost hear the city say. (Don’t even get me started on Florence.)

Back to Natasha, who wins the award for best presentation for the pre-shoot lingerie show-and-tell. (I told her this, and she curtseyed.) A couple things caught my eye – the sheer tan dress with comically tall boots and the colorful orange and blue number you see here. She suggested the ripped jeans, which she made herself during a train ride. (Great for photos, probably not so great for casual outdoor use.) The studio did a lot of the heavy lifting; the furniture, the textures of the floor and wall, and the huge windows all made it easy to get stunning shots straight out of camera. Three cheers (as usual) for the Glimmerglass filters I started using a few months ago, because they played extremely well with the light and Natasha’s skin. If I have a secret sauce, these filters are an ingredient.

Two hours passed by relatively quickly, as we made good use of what the studio had to offer. Everything looked good next to the window, so I pushed the couch over there, and then the chair, and then just had her stand for some poses as well. It probably goes without saying that she needs very little direction, although she was happy to have it whenever I piped up with an idea. The only out-of-left-field thing I went for was to shoot with the twisted roots prop. I have no idea what it is or why it’s in there, but I put Natasha behind it to see if we could do anything interesting with her peeking through it. It mostly didn’t work, but hey, you never know until you try. (My mantra for this whole enterprise, honestly.)

And so went my time with Natasha, the well-traveled and world-famous leggy lady from Russia but also Italy and parts in between. Will I ever feel like this is my job? Like I belong in these spaces, doing these things? Maybe it’s too early to say, but I’m enjoying the experience. Thanks for reading.

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Natasha's Full Shoot

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution as a part of their subscription. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

Anyway, meet model number one for the trip: Ania, from Moldova. (IG: ania.alexandrovna) She’s only the second Moldovan I’ve ever met, and the other one also happens to be a beautiful woman. Must be a thing. (Note to self: go to Moldova.) I’m shooting all three models in studios from the same company (Cross Studio, if you’re in the area and want a recommendation). Like in Hong Kong, these spaces are in converted industrial buildings a bit off the beaten path, so finding them is always something of an adventure. Thankfully there was a helpful chap named Enrico who sent me a little map and greeted me when I found the place.

He had seen the “Naked Prose” moniker in my contact info and assumed that I’d be doing a nude model shoot, so he had already pre-heated the studio space for our comfort. A lovely gesture, especially as it’s late October and fall is in full swing in northern Italy. The industrial heating unit, however, was a bit too good at its job, and it was sweltering inside. I turned it off before Ania arrived, but the space was… cozy, let’s say, for quite some time. (Until the end of the shoot, actually – we both noticed how comfortable the room was as we were leaving.)

Ania arrived on time and immediately did the usual show-and-tell; even though she knew it was primarily a nude shoot, she had a variety of lingerie options that would play well with the space. The space – I guess I should say more about it. First of all, it’s huge. Probably three times the square footage (meterage? metrage? Melissa Etheridge?) I’d get for the same price in Hong Kong. A seamless white background occupied the entirety of one corner, while a couch and some other furniture sat on the opposite side, all moveable for our purposes. The light was entirely natural daylight, which streamed in from both the ceiling and several segmented windows on the far wall.

Light galore! I picked up a camera while Ania was getting ready to see what we’d be working with, and it was a best-case-scenario. (ISO 200, f/2.8 or narrower throughout the space.) Well, almost best-case. The wiggly glass panes were perfectly serviceable at diffusing the light, but between them were thick black lines that created a distinct grid pattern of light and shadow. There wasn’t much I could do about this if I wanted to work in the bright light (the best light) near the windows, so I chose to lean into the contrasting look rather than shoot to minimize it. (A cloudy day would have masked the problem, but it was late morning and nary an obstruction filtered the sunlight.)

I fought with this geometric dappled light with ambivalence throughout the shoot. Sometimes it created a dramatic look that I leaned into, other times it confounded my attempts to frame up a shot. I had to drag the couch around to a few different places before the light fell evenly across Ania’s long, slender form. The only time I got away from it was at the very end of the shoot, when we were using the suspended chair. It was fun to work with (for Ania at least, who giggled while she struggled to keep it from spinning around) and far enough away from the windows that the light was perfectly even. (I guess there’s a tip for harsh window light – just move away from it. Inverse square law!)

I should say more about Ania, because she was fun and easy to work with. I won’t give away her age, but she’s older than you think, despite being a university student finishing her degree. Her phone was low on battery and she didn’t bring a charger, so she enlisted my phone to provide the soundtrack for the shoot. First she queued up a playlist called “Photoshoot Music”, but it quickly proved not to be the vibe she was looking for, so she shopped around for a better one. “Shooting Playlist” did the trick – an eclectic mix of stuff I’d mostly never heard before with a few pop hits thrown in for good measure. Ania danced and sang along between poses, so I guess she was happy with it. I’ll try to remember that when the app recommends “Purple Disco Machine” and “Kygo” to me for the next several weeks.

She was also refreshingly direct and easy to talk to, like the Ukrainian models tend to be. I think there’s a frankness of speech (the Greeks called it parrhesia) woven into the culture of former USSR territories. I prefer it to the polite but often unhelpful verbal circumlocutions one hears from Brits, Canadians, and Americans not from the northeast, but that’s just me. We had a little chat about our eye colors (hers are hazel, brown with a ring of green) when we were shooting with the mirror and a longer sidebar about remembering dreams and internal monologues.

We still managed plenty of shooting amidst the idle chatter. Some things worked, some really didn’t, but Ania was a good sport and helpful collaborator throughout. It was a great experience going to a different country and seeing how the model and studio scene operates, so I’m looking forward to another two attempts over the next two days. Stay tuned for more, as always!

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Ania's Full Gallery

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

One of my favorite events of the year (because I’m weird, or maybe just a photographer) is the Hong Kong Flower Show, which is exactly what it sounds like – a sprawling outdoor exhibition of eleventy billion flowers. It occurs around mid-March every year, when the weather is warm but not yet oppressive, and the cost of entry is a paltry two US dollars. It was one of the things I missed the most, in fact, when it was cancelled three years running during the pandemic. According to my photographic archives, I first attended in 2017; 2026 was my seventh visit.

I don’t go for the ambience. Truth be told, like most things in Hong Kong, the flower show is overrun with people of all sorts from open ‘til close. You can, at least, pick your poison: Weekend? Domestic helpers and tourists. Weekday? School trips and the elderly. And they’re all taking photos of the flowers, with the flowers, in the flowers, with their phones. I’d love to know how many terabytes of these snaps the hordes dump onto social media platforms each day. Actually, I probably wouldn’t.

And most of those photographs are trash. I know because I watch people take them.

Look, I’m not here to argue with you if you think your iPhone 17 takes great photographs of flowers. (It doesn’t, but if you think it does, what do I know? I’m just some guy on the internet.) If you’d like to level up your flower photo game, here’s everything I’ve learned about photographing these colorful little organisms from my seven years of shooting the Hong Kong Flower Show. (All images in this article are my own, taken over those seven years.)

Section 1 – Gear

Let’s talk equipment. There is only one thing that is an absolute necessity for shooting good pictures of flowers, and that’s a macro lens*. I mean it. This is the sine quā nōn of flower photography: a true macro lens, one that does life-sized 1:1 magnification. Now, you can still get good results with something that does at least 0.5x magnification, like the Lensbaby Velvet 56, which I’ve taken to more than one flower show, but if you can get your hands on a dedicated macro lens, you do it. Y’hear?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, macro lenses are specially designed to allow extremely close focusing so you can achieve that true 1:1 subject-to-sensor ratio. This means that you can get close enough that the object you’re photographing takes up as much space in the frame as it would in real life if you put it on the camera’s image sensor. Some lenses can do even greater magnification than that, but any lens labeled “macro” should do at least 1:1. (This does not stop some unscrupulous lens manufacturers from putting the word “macro” on their lenses when they’re not capable of this kind of magnification. A pox on them.)

For the reader who doesn’t already have a macro lens, I have good news – you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get one. Yes, every lens manufacturer makes fancy ones with extra features like auto focus, weather sealing, and fast apertures, but you don’t need these things. For example, OM System makes a 90mm macro lens with image stabilization, auto focus, and 2:1 magnification. I’m sure it’s amazing, but it’s $1,499 and overkill for this assignment. I’ve shot the last two flower shows with a comically tiny (it weighs 240 grams and fits in a pants pocket) Laowa 50mm f/2.8, which doesn’t have auto focus or image stabilization but will do up to 2:1 magnification. Several of the images you’re seeing here were taken with it. It’s $399 new.

But you can spend even less than that! Find an old manual focus macro lens with a different mount, say Canon EF or Nikon F, and just use it with a cheap adapter. There are even reversing rings that allow you to mount a camera lens backwards to unlock its hidden macro capabilities. You do not need to spend a lot of money to get an appropriate tool for the job here!

Ok, with the necessity (I mean it! Go get a macro lens!) out of the way, let’s talk about some nice-to-haves. I’d recommend a current-ish mirrorless camera body over a DSLR. I only say this because most mirrorless camera bodies have extremely useful (bordering on indispensable, once you get used to them) features like viewfinder zooming and focus peaking. The first is what it sounds like – since the viewfinder on a mirrorless camera is electronic (it’s basically a live video feed of the sensor), you can zoom in on any part of the frame to get a closer look at what’s in focus. (Some DSLRs can sort of do this, like Canon’s “Live View”, but you need to use the rear LCD, not the viewfinder.) Focus peaking is a feature that shows a visual cue on the in-focus area of an image in the viewfinder, usually a high-contrast color like red. This way you can see exactly what parts of the image are in focus even if your eyes aren’t so good. Trying to do macro photography without these two things is not very fun. Not impossible, but a decidedly less-good time.

You might call me crazy for putting this last thing in the nice-to-have column, but that’s how I feel about a tripod in this situation. Nice to have. It’ll absolutely cut down on the number of shots you need to take to get good results compared to hand-holding. I almost never use one at the flower show, but that’s a personal preference more than anything else. Plenty of other photographers there do, so it’s clearly not crazy, but I tend to want to work faster and move around more to capture the whole show in one day, and a tripod slows me down too much to accomplish that. If you’ve got a good one, bring it along and try it out.

(A bonus nice-to-have – knee pads. You’re going to be doing most of this work very close to and/or on the ground.)

Section 2 – Working the Camera

Now that you’ve got yourself a macro lens (right? a real one?) and a mirrorless camera, you’re ready for action. All of the standard concerns apply here, so let’s talk about shutter speed, aperture, and focusing. (One bit of advice up front – shoot in RAW to give yourself the most headroom in Section 4 – Editing.)

Since you’re going to be taking pictures of things close-up at high magnification, you’re going to need to keep those shutter speeds up to eliminate blurriness due to camera movement. (This is, of course, assuming you’re not using a tripod.) This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re shooting outside in daylight, but pay attention if you start stopping down the aperture. (If it’s windy, just go home. It’s not worth the headache.) Watch out for the opposite problem as well – on a sunny day at wide apertures, you may exceed your camera’s maximum shutter speed. Review your images at the beginning to make sure they’re properly exposed and not blurry.

Understanding aperture is extremely important for good results here. (I generally shoot in aperture priority mode [Av on the camera dial] when I’m at the flower show.) Depth-of-field (the range of the photo that’s in focus) gets very shallow the closer you get to your subject; this is one of the biggest difficulties in macro photography. (The shallow focus effect is stronger on larger sensors, so grab an APS-C or MFT body for this job if you have one.) Play around with settings to find the look that you want. Start with the lens wide open; if the DOF is too shallow, stop the aperture down and/or move away from the subject to increase depth of field. Be careful to find the right balance – if you stop down too much, your shutter speeds may get too slow, and too much of the background will be in focus, distracting from the subject.

[For more advanced users, there is a technique to fix this problem called focus stacking, in which multiple images are taken at different focus distances and combined afterwards, but this is not the easiest thing to learn to do (and impossible without a tripod). It is a good solution to the depth of field problem and can produce amazing results, so feel free to explore it more if it interests you, but none of the images you see here are focus stacked.]

Finally, let’s talk about focusing at these high magnifications. You really do need to nail focus in this type of photography, as the tolerances are quite literally razor thin. You might be tempted to rely on auto focus if your lens has it, but in truth it’s no advantage in this case. Turn it off and focus manually instead. (There’s one exception to this, which I’ll mention at the end.)

If you’re doing this work hand-held (like me, the masochist), the best method to get shots with your desired focus is not to turn the focus ring, but to move the camera closer or further from the subject. You’re not going to be able to hold yourself perfectly still anyway, so there’s no point in trying to turn the focus ring while you’re inadvertently swaying around. (You might think that you can hold a camera perfectly still, but up close at 1:1 magnification you will discover that you are wrong.) You can turn the focus ring to get the subject close to in focus at the distance you want to shoot, but to get precise focus, just move yourself toward or away from the subject as slowly and deliberately as you can. You can use your camera’s burst mode to capture multiple images as you slightly adjust focus front to back. Be prepared to delete most of the images you capture when you shoot this way – my keeper rate this year was about 10% – but it will get the job done.

Section 3 – Composition

Even though you’re trying a strange and novel kind of photography, there are still basic rules that you should aim to follow just as you would when you shoot anything else. There are a bunch of these, so let’s just bullet-point our way through them:

• Look for good light. Direct sunlight can be too harsh for the bright colors of flowers. An overcast day is better for shooting outdoors; if it’s sunny, shoot early in the morning or late in the afternoon to get more diffuse light. Avoid dappled light (a sharp mix of light and shadow) at all costs. If you’re stuck with bright sun, create some shade over the scene you’re photographing by blocking the light with anything you have handy.

• Consider normal rules of composition like the rule of thirds, negative space, framing, leading lines, the golden ratio, and symmetry. Your composition needs to be balanced and thoughtful in addition to in focus!

• Look for interesting subjects. For me, that means water droplets (feel free to add your own with a spray bottle – nobody will know!), bits of pollen, wonky or wilting blossoms, and little critters like insects crawling on petals.

• Sink to their level. We humans tower like feudal Lords over flowers, which, lowly creatures as they are, remain close to the soil from which they emerge. As such, we’re used to seeing flowers from the top and at some distance. To make your photographs more interesting, get down at eye level (or below!). You might need to get a little dirty or wet to get the good stuff.

• Focus on single blossoms. Photos of sprawling fields of sunflowers and tulips can be spellbinding, but you don’t need a macro lens for that. Find one flower or small cluster and focus on isolating it from the rest. Get closer and keep the frame clean and uncluttered.

• Mind the background! It’s very easy to ignore the out-of-focus areas in your composition while you’re trying to pay attention to the subject, but take a moment to look at the entire frame. Are there prominent distractions interfering with your subject? Sometimes just moving an inch or two in one direction can clear up the background so your subject can shine.

Section 4 – Editing

Now that you’re back at your house with all of these amazing RAW images of flowers, it’s time to tidy them up a bit and get them ready for public consumption. Make global corrections first, like adjusting the white balance, correcting chromatic aberration, and fixing lens distortion and vignetting. From there, try to keep your editing localized to the parts that need it.

For example, instead of grabbing the hue/saturation sliders and overcooking the entire scene, focus in on individual colors and only adjust what’s needed (Lightroom makes it very easy to do this). Same goes for sharpening – if you have a single flower subject and a blurred background, apply sharpening to the flower only, not the whole scene. Keep an eye on the histogram to make sure you’re not clipping any highlights, shadows, or bright colors. (Working with RAW files will help dramatically with this.)

Finally, don’t be too precious about the “accuracy” of the scene. I, for example, prefer my green hues nudged a bit to the blue side, so I always adjust my greens that way even though the “true” scene appeared more yellow. I also love (too much! I admit it!) to use vignettes on flower images to draw attention to the subject. I frequently remove distractions and imperfections to produce a final image of a much more perfect flower than I actually saw that day. Don’t feel bad about doing this! If somebody tries to tell you that you’re being dishonest or misrepresenting reality, poke them in the eyeball.

That one exception I mentioned before – BIF (bees in flight)

I love to try to photograph bees (and other insects, but mostly bees) at the flower show, and when I’m successful, they’re my favorite images. (I just think they’re kind of cute up-close, ok? They’re fuzzy.) Getting macro shots of live bees with a manual focus lens is difficult nearly to the point of futility. I’ve never used a macro lens with auto focus, but I have to think that it would be a very helpful feature in this situation. That said, it is possible to do this with manual focus. You’ll need to be patient and persistent. (And, like, probably not allergic to bees. Don’t sue me if you get Macaulay-Culkin-in-My-Girled.) Again, use burst mode to increase your chances of keepers, and move forward or backwards to focus instead of twisting the focus ring.

Once you’ve got a bee in your sights, follow it until it lands and sits still for a moment, get it in focus, and shoot like crazy. Yes, this is going to put you in very close and repeated contact with bees. In my experience at the flower show, the bees are like kids in a candy store, so drunk on nectar and pollen that they’re not interested in anything else, so I haven’t had any trouble. YMMV. (If you really want a buffer, use a macro lens with a longer focal length, like 100mm, or even 150 or 180. This will let you fill the frame with the stingy critters from further away.)

Most importantly, just go try it

Flowers are ubiquitous, and when you’re getting down amongst them in the macro realm, you really can do this kind of shooting wherever you encounter them. You don’t need to fly out for the Hong Kong Flower Show. Hop the fence when your green-thumbed neighbor isn’t looking and go to town on her rhododendrons. You won’t start to perfect this kind of photography until you, you know, … start.

Other photographers out there, feel free to chip in with your own tips and tricks for up-close flower photography - I’m sure there’s more that I could learn as well!

*Just to stop other veteran photographers from yelling at me in the comments, there is another equipment solution to the flower equation: a long and fast telephoto lens. There are a few reasons I’ve relegated this to a footnote. First of all, I’ve never really done any flower photography with a long tele lens, so I have no advice from experience on doing it well. Secondly, the cost of entry is much higher for this kind of lens than an old manual focus macro, so it’s not a good recommendation for someone who just wants to take pictures of flowers. If you’ve got some examples of flower photos shot with long fast tele lenses, please link or comment below!

I’m working with four new models over my summer vacation in the US this year, and as you’d probably expect, all of them are American. Living in Asia and doing most of my photography there, I rarely encounter models whose first language is English, so I’d gotten used to sessions that are at least partially fraught with communication challenges. “Art from adversity,” I’d tell myself. Or, since I know my way around the Latin language, Nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus, as the poet Horace wrote - “life has given nothing to mortals without great effort.”

It’s also nice, though, when things are easy, and so it was with today’s model, Ivy Millz (IG: @ivymilllz). She’s not just a native English speaker, she’s from my hometown. And a decade younger than I am, so it’s not as though we’d crossed paths before, but we had no trouble chatting about local life from the moment we met until we wrapped the shoot two hours later.

Since Ivy was the second model I shot in the same rented apartment, I was conscious of trying to find unique things to do with her to distinguish her shoot from the previous one (with Crystal). I had a couple ideas based on the experience of that first shoot. For one, I took down the giant mirror on the wall behind the couch, because I found it difficult to keep myself and/or the TV on the opposite wall out of the shot. (Let me tell you how much fun it was to put it back up by myself before checking out of the place.)

There were other natural differences that helped create some separation, too. No erotica with Ivy, just art nude. She also took that description quite seriously and did not show up with a duffel bag full of shoes, lingerie, and accessories for show and tell. “You said just art nude, right?” she asked, shedding her underwear with a deft downward motion and her dress on the way up. I think that’s the fastest I’ve yet seen a model go from arrival to ready for the camera.

Models will also distinguish themselves by the idiosyncratic ways that they move and pose. I tend to embrace this natural variation and let the ladies be themselves whenever possible. Not just because I’m not the best at posing models, but also because it leads to a more frictionless, flowing shoot imbued with a healthy dose of the model’s own sense of her art. I find it’s easy to get what I need from a model well within her comfort zone.

That was absolutely the right approach with Ivy, who moves like no other model I’ve worked with. As we chatted, I learned that she has extensive training and experience as a dancer and a gymnast, which should be obvious as you’re looking at her poses. What you can’t see from the stills is the way that she shifts – dances, practically – between those poses. She’s almost always in motion, save for brief pauses for the shot. I learned quickly that I needed to keep my eye glued to the viewfinder, watching her through the lens for those moments when she hit on a pose. Demanding for me, yes, but comfortable for her; I knew we’d get good shots as long as I could keep up.

You’ll see some of the standard naked-female-on-a-bed poses here, too; I think it’s important to show how straightforwardly beautiful she is when she’s just draped over some furniture. Another feature of this shoot that sets it apart from the previous one is the time of day – Ivy came later in the afternoon, when the light streaming in through the apartment’s tall windows was a soft golden hue, equal parts warming and flattering for her complexion.

And then there’s the avant-garde, ambitious, audacious poses. I think she felt a complete freedom from the beginning to just go for it at any moment during the shoot. Bending, stretching, reaching, arching, folding – she pulled everything out of her bag of tricks. She really had fun in the window seat, practically doing a full balance beam routine as I raced to figure out exposure and focus amidst her acrobatics. “Do you like weird poses?” she asked at one point, having already contorted herself into the pretzel you see below. Whether I like them or not, I made sure to capture them for her and for all of you, dear readers.

Quite a fun shoot, then, this one turned out to be, mostly thanks to Ms. Millz and her protean posing and ever-undulating, limber limbs. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go work on my splits.

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Ivy's Full Gallery

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

For me, those people are Generation Z (aka Gen-Z, or Zoomers), born between 1997 and 2012, and I don’t like them very much. They display a pathological dependence on technology while having almost no practical knowledge of how it works, rely heavily on influencers and social media to decide what to consume, are crippled by FOMO and general anxiety, don’t drink very much, and like the Star Wars prequels. Utter degenerates, really.

Their stock has been rising a bit lately though, at least in my eyes, because apparently they’re ditching their smartphones for old compact digital cameras for personal photography.

Before I give these 20-something broken clocks too much credit, I should point out the simplest explanation for this, which is your average, run-of-the-mill cycle of abandonment → dormancy → revival. Counterculture, in a word. This happens most conspicuously in the fashion industry, but it’s a technological phenomenon as well. In my own lifetime I’ve experienced it with vinyl records and film photography, neither of which I grew up with but both of which I embraced when I was in my late twenties, the same age as the most mature members of Gen-Z today.

This is the most likely explanation for the Zoomers’ widespread rejection of the iPhone for their snapshots: neophilia. Neo to them, anyway - many of you reading this probably had a compact digital camera in the 2010s and don’t miss it in the slightest. (I did, and I don’t.) You might even be struggling to imagine exactly how an obsolete, plasticky little point-and-shoot with an embarrassing designation like Coolpix or Cyber-shot written on it could be appealing to anyone anno domini 2026.

After all, these things were designed for convenience, not for bleeding-edge image quality. (See above - a photo I took in 2003 with a FujiFilm FinePix 3800, a 3-megapixel camera that cost $450 at the time, or almost $800 in today’s money.) And yet, the Zoomers are gobbling them up and partying like it’s 1999.

While the novelty argument may well be the only explanation one needs to make sense of this, I’d like to offer a complementary theory, which goes like this:

Smartphone photography sucks.

Before you start angrily typing in the comments, some throat-clearing and clarification. I am not commenting on the quality of the photographs that modern smartphones produce. (I still believe that phones are technologically inferior to actual cameras and not for any serious photographic work, but we can argue about that some other time.) I’m making an observation here about the experience of using a smartphone to take photographs. That’s the thing that sucks. Not necessarily the result, but the process. Taking a photo with that shameful purple Nikon above is a more satisfying experience, I would argue, than taking the same photo with the latest iPhone.

To understand why smartphone photography is so dissatisfying an experience, we need to zoom out a bit and talk about touchscreens in general. Crudely described, a phone is really just a slab of glass, plastic, and metal with a giant touchscreen on one side and a camera bump on the other. While touchscreens offer a lot in the way of accessibility and space saving over other input devices, they’re also hopelessly imprecise and exhausting to use extensively, even with haptic feedback or a stylus. If you have to type a long string of text, for example, doing that with your thumbs on a flat piece of glass is a vastly inferior experience to doing the same with ten fingers on a physical keyboard. Hell, even typing with your thumbs on a little plastic keyboard à la Blackberry was preferable, and many people lamented the death of the those devices for that reason alone.

I was a relatively late adopter of the smartphone, but when I did finally hop on the trend, my choice was the Samsung Epic 4G (above), which featured a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard. If any major manufacturer offered something like this right now, I’d probably buy it. Perhaps this isn’t as crazy as it sounds: there’s a company called Clicks that is taking preorders for an external physical keyboard attachment for MagSafe-equipped phones and is also cooking up a bespoke Android phone with a Blackberry-style physical keyboard.

But phone tech isn’t the only domain in which touchscreens are being seen for the limited and imperfect technology that they are - automotive interior design is now moving away from screens in favor of physical stalks, switches, toggles, sliders - anything we humans can wrap our little jointed digits around. This has gone beyond simple preferences based on user feedback; the EU New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) says that new car models will need to use physical controls instead of touchscreens in order to earn their highest rating. Even Jony Ive, who worked at Apple and was instrumental in bringing touchscreens to all of our palms, has called them “the wrong technology” to use in cars because they can’t be operated safely (i.e. without the driver looking away from the road).

I think you can see where this critique is going, vis-à-vis smartphone cameras. Just to run down the list quickly, here are the biggest problems with the experience of taking photographs with a touchscreen slab, from my own perspective:

• The screen doubles as the viewfinder, but outside in bright light it can be too hard to see clearly.

• The screen doesn’t articulate in any direction, so if you want to take a photo of something at some angle, you can’t see what you’re photographing.

• Trying to adjust individual settings in some kind of pro/manual mode is difficult to access in a camera app and awkward to use (at least on my Pixel 8 Pro).

• Phone cameras do not have adjustable apertures, eliminating one of the key elements of control and creativity in photography. That’s one third of the exposure triangle gone. If you want to adjust the other two elements (ISO and shutter speed) manually, you have to do so by flipping through menus within a piece of software - not something you can be doing constantly if you actually want to take some pictures. Manual mode on a phone camera is impractical, bordering on pointless.

• There’s not a predictable and consistent relationship between pressing the shutter button (which isn’t even a button at all if you’re touching the screen) and the camera taking a photo, making photography of moving objects a total crapshoot.

• Distractions! There’s nothing to stop notifications from other apps interrupting the moment and stealing your attention when you’re trying to take a picture.

• Software lag. If I set my phone to take photos in its highest resolution, there’s a significant processing time between pressing the shutter and having the image be finished and viewable. If I take multiple photos too quickly, the phone doesn’t allow me to take more photos until it’s caught up.

• No interchangeable lenses. Most high end cameras now have something like a three lens loadout (wide, standard, tele) to cover most things. That’s all you get. (Companies have been trying to get people to buy external lenses to attach to their phone cameras for years, but they never seem to catch on.)

In short, despite my phone being a fairly capable photographic device from a technical standpoint, the practical limitations of using it for anything other than casual snapshots when I don’t have an actual camera with me or for quick sharing on social media render it less useful than its specs suggest it should be. To put a finer point on it, I would never reach for a smartphone if I were going on a photo walk. If photos are the point, my phone is demoted to navigation tool, and I grab the OM-1.

It should be clearer now how even a plasticky purple point-and-shoot like that Nikon atrocity above would offer a much more satisfying experience of photography to the user, even if the photos it produces are underwhelming technically. (For Gen-Z, incidentally, this is also a feature rather than a bug - they find the imperfect, low-res renderings charmingly retro without the need for filters.)

Furthermore, a touchscreen fails to take advantage of the fact that a typical human has two fully articulating arms and hands with ten fingers, all independently operable for controlling, adjusting, and actuating. While that little Coolpix gadget doesn’t have all of the fancy dials and buttons that an SLR has, you can at least hold it up in front of you in your right hand and operate it deftly, thumb on the back controls and index finger on the shutter. You can scroll through your photos without distraction and show them to friends without the interruption of immediately having to send them to everyone (because you can’t). These are all positive things for taking photographs.

If you remain skeptical, remind yourself of how taking a photograph with your phone works:

1. Retrieve the device from your pocket or bag.

2. Go through whatever unlocking procedure is required to gain access to it.

3. Get distracted by notifications and spend 17 minutes scrolling an app before you remember why you unlocked your phone.

4. Open the camera app.

5. Hold your phone out in front of you, probably with two hands so you don’t drop it, which you will often anyway, possibly into water or a ravine.

6. Swipe away more notifications so that you can actually see the screen and frame your shot.

7. Press the shutter on the screen and hope that you didn’t miss the button, which you can’t feel because it isn’t actually a button but a designated area of pixels in the shape of a button.

8. Post the photo on social media and wait for validation that it’s good and that you therefore have value as a person.

Now compare this with the same process on the purple Nikon from the Bush (GW) administration:

1. Retrieve camera (if it’s not already in your hand or hanging on a wrist strap).

2. Press the shutter button to wake it up.

3. Take a picture.

I don’t know… one of those just seems a lot more straightforwardly pleasant than the other if you’re just trying to take a picture. The most shocking part of all of this is that I can see myself moving into a new stage of life. Having passed through old man yells at cloud, I’ve settled into the kids are alright. So it goes.

It’s my summer vacation, so naturally I’m spending most of it working. I make an annual pilgrimage back to my home town to see family and friends, but this time I’ve also managed to cram in five model shoots while I’m here. I rented an apartment to accommodate all of that shooting; there’s not all that much to pick from in my little town, but I combed through photos in the listings to find some good light.

Nor did it disappoint when I arrived – there’s a sizable living room and two bedrooms to work with, all generously lit by tall windows with clerestory hoppers at the roofline. (Yes, I had to look that up. You’re welcome, architects.) At the base of each window in all three rooms was a window seat, perfect for flattering portrait lighting or dramatic poses.

The first model I had the chance to work with in this space was Crystal, the lovely long-haired lass you see here. When I was looking for models in the area to try to work with, she caught my eye very early on. It’s everything about her, really – her long, dark hair, those deep brown eyes, her warm and inviting smile – but I was most interested in capturing and accentuating her figure. She’s classically beautiful, in that her proportions are like those of the art of antiquity.

And she knows how to evoke that classical beauty. She’s only been modeling for a few years, but it’s her full-time gig, so she came with a comprehensive repertoire of poses worthy of Michelangelo (or any of the other Ninja Turtles). If you want to keep up with her work, follow her on IG – she’s a busy girl. Demanding, too – when I first reached out to her, she told me that she only works with photographers with verified experience and wanted some references. I gave her some, and she followed up on them! I liked that, actually. Tough but fair.

We started the shoot with a usual feature of these projects, which I’ve taken to calling show and tell. Every model who does these kinds of shoots is in possession of no fewer than seventeen thousand pieces of lingerie, shoes, and props/accessories, most of which she’ll bring along to the shoot regardless of what was discussed prior, and Crystal was no exception. Even though she’s perfect just the way she is, I did pick out a couple things that I thought would complement the colors in the living room and bedrooms, so you’ll see a bit of color and texture thrown in with the pure nudes.

Wardrobe selections agreed upon, we got to work in the living room first. I was a little worried that the light from the large windows in every room would be too harshly directional to be flattering, but the worst of the midday sun was enervated by surrounding buildings and by a considerable amount of dirt that had built up on the outer panes. It’s sort of like replacing the windows with huge Glimmerglass filters. The living room was also big enough that it was easy to step away from the light sources just enough to get the best diffused light.

The two bedrooms are very similar, but just different enough that it was worth shooting in both. One has a bigger bed and wooden floors, the other a smaller bed and carpet. There was also a small, rectangular mirror that was frustratingly close to being useful for some creative shots, but I struggled to get the compositions to work.

We shot quite a bit in the window seats in multiple rooms as well. I find the strong light is great for close-ups and more standard portrait-style compositions, but Crystal’s model brain (and young, cooperative body) immediately went into creative pose mode. I’ll share my favorite of her contortions here for your consideration – she really went for it!

I just want to riff a little bit here at the end about erotica as opposed to art nude, because I very much consider myself a student and purveyor of the latter rather than the former. That said, I’m trying to make a living here, and I know there’s a market (probably a bigger one, let’s be honest) for erotic content (which, in the modeling world, really just means “open leg poses”). I shot some of that kind of content with Stephanie, and Crystal was perfectly happy to do it as well. (Not all art nude models will do erotica; the ones who do charge more for their time when it’s involved.)

She mentioned during the shoot that there were really only a few poses to throw out when it comes to the open leg stuff, which I think gets to my difficulty with it: it’s hard to do creatively, or artistically. Perhaps that’s the point – erotica is a blunt instrument of visual engagement, not meant to be deftly executed. Still, the creative in me doesn’t want to accept that premise, so I’ll just have to do some deeper exploration of the genre and learn what else I can do with it. For those of you who enjoy the blatant, the obvious, the unsubtle – become a paid subscriber and you’ll get what you’re looking for after the paywall!

If you love seeing Crystal as much as I enjoyed working with her, I’ve got good news: we had such a positive experience that we decided to do it again while I was in town. Stay tuned for more of her – the same, but different!

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Crystal's Full Gallery

Share

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

As I busied myself with unpacking and assembling my chosen camera gear for the day (the usual – two OM bodies and the f/1.7 zooms with Glimmerglass filters), she wanted to know my astrological sign. This shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was; she does, after all, feature her star sign quite prominently in her social media accounts. I just hadn’t really noticed, because I have never been even the slightest bit interested in astrology. This is Stephanie: unapologetically and confidently herself in all moments. (We’re both Virgos, by the way.)

She gave me the photography-relevant tour of her house, which is extensive. Three floors, each with at least one room or area to explore creatively. The place is overflowing with natural textures and good old-fashioned American character. The building itself is quite aged (by American standards, anyway), and the décor befits the rustic, rural landscape in which it sits: a forest’s worth of wood, well-worn with a patina of use. It’s also a hot, sweaty place on this late July morning.

We began downstairs in the dining room and kitchen, with Stephanie leading the way after a quick initial chat about what I expected from the shoot. Not only is she my first American model, she’s also the first one for whom erotica was expressly included in the agreement. (So, if you’d like to see more of Stephanie, wink wink, become a paying subscriber for access to the whole shoot at the end of this post.)

I’m not nearly as interested in shooting erotica as art nude, but she was there and willing, and there’s an audience for it, as she reminded me, so she worked her poses from unassuming to unabashed in each location. Erotica won’t ever be the focus of Naked Prose, but I’ll dabble a bit when the opportunity arises with certain models who are experienced and confident with the style.

Stephanie correctly gleaned from my portfolio that I’m primarily (almost exclusively) a natural light shooter. We both then noticed that I was going to have my work cut out for me. The only usable light came through the house’s windows, which it obviously has many of, but it was a completely cloudy late morning, and there’s a sizable tree shading much of the front of the house, so the light I had to work with was rather weak in most places. Complicating things further, the windows were generally without covering – large squares of unattenuated daylight that Stephanie had to sidle up to. I also managed to forget my little foldable white balance target, so I had to fashion a makeshift stand-in out of a piece of A4 paper. Very professional.

The sum of all of these parts is a shoot that is simultaneously quite varied and rather one-note. The range of different locations in the house gives the images plenty of visual variety; in fact we didn’t make use of every possible nook and cranny (sometimes we were competing with her two dogs for indoor real estate). Much of the time, though, we were working with a piece of furniture directly next to a large uncovered window. There’s some moodiness in the contrast that kind of light creates, and Stephanie of course did well to find the best light and looks for herself. The shoot definitely had a coherence and consistency given the scenes that were on offer.

That is, of course, until we ended up in the cornfield.

We were in the attic (having gradually worked our way upwards from the ground floor), approaching what felt like a natural conclusion to the day’s work. I was already a sweaty mess from standing, kneeling, bracing, raising and lowering a camera, all in an inadequately fan-cooled third story, and I could have called it a day. Stephanie, ever the professional, suggested a change of scenery.

There’s a cornfield (sprawling, as they tend to be in this part of the country) just in front of the house. It’s not her cornfield, mind you, and she has neighbors within reasonable peeping distance, so we had to navigate our way a couple rows deep into the vegetation for privacy assurance. It was hot, buggy, itchy, muddy – not qualities I actively seek in this line of work, so we were only out there for a few minutes. But hey! Stephanie, naked in a cornfield. Maybe that’s what you needed today.

A fittingly quirky end to a thoroughly enjoyable shoot with an endlessly entertaining model. Hopefully I’ll be able to work with her again next summer – who knows where we’ll end up next time…

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Stephanie's Full Gallery

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

“I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.”

Hopefully today’s post, the art-nude photographer’s equivalent of two chicks at the same time, would make Lawrence proud. To be honest, though, the prospect of working with two models simultaneously is actually more terrifying than exciting. The addition of a second model somehow seems not to double the difficulty of the shoot, but to triple it: I need to be mindful not just of each model’s pose and expression, but also the interplay between them, to say nothing of the usual concerns of balance and composition.

It won’t be shocking, then, to learn that this was not my idea; these two Ukrainian ladies (honestly I’ve met more Ukrainian women in the past few months than I had in the previous forty years, not that I’m complaining) were traveling together around southeast Asia and suggested that we all work together. The two of them know each other quite well and have modeled in tandem many times, which immediately removes a lot of the complexity of a shoot like this. They also proposed that we shoot for one hour and offered their accommodation as the location. Neither of those particulars is ideal for me, but in the spirit of wanting to keep things fresh and challenging, I agreed to one hour, two models, at their location.

…a location that turned out to be in the hilly part of central Hong Kong, up about two hundred stairs depending on the approach vector. Google maps plotted a terrible one and, accepting it uncritically, I climbed all of the stairs. In fact I walked past the place initially, so I got to redo part of the route in descent as well. All of this while carrying my gear in my brand-new Peak Design roller bag, which now became the least convenient way I could have chosen to carry my crap. Also it’s mid-day in mid-June, 86^oF (30^oC) and 90% humidity. The cherry on top: as soon as I arrive, I recognize that the building is a walk-up. ::chef’s kiss::

Mercifully, the ladies’ room was only on the first floor, but I was still a sweaty mess upon arrival. Having seen the building from the outside, I already knew what I was in for, and it’s exactly what I expected: a small space in an old building with sparse light and minimal furniture for scene changes. Other fun surprises included what appeared to be a small emergency-glass-breaking hammer on a chain hanging on a random cabinet and, to the complete befuddlement of the girls, a rather large hand saw hanging on the wall. 🤷‍♂️ I spent the first several minutes chatting with the two models, partly because I enjoy meeting these women and hearing their stories, but also because I needed a minute (or six) to try to cool off.

Inevitably we talk about the war. One of them still lives in Kyiv, steadfastly unwilling to leave, while the other has left Ukraine and is now living elsewhere in the EU as a refugee. Their stories of what it’s like are hard for me to comprehend as someone who has never had to endure anything of the sort. All I can do is listen, shake my head, express my support. We don’t linger on it – we’ve only got an hour on the clock anyway.

Immediately upon seeing the space, I knew that conditions weren’t going to be optimal for my usual shooting preferences. On a perfect day, there’s enough natural light that I can shoot at ISO 200 and dial in some positive exposure composition to make sure the images are bright, colorful, and dynamic. Today, though, it’s looking like an ISO 400-800 kind of day, and there will be no hopes of exposing-to-the-right. I’ve got my favorite ultra-fast Panasonic zooms with me, but I can’t shoot them wide open like I normally do: two models means two faces that need to be in focus, which means stopping down the aperture, which means slower shutter speeds. They settled around the 1/30 to 1/60 range, which is in the danger zone for motion blur (not from the camera moving, but the models). I tried to time my shutter actuations to capture peak stillness, but with two models moving independently there was still the occasional ruined shot.

For their part, the professionals got to work immediately, suggesting some ideas based on prior shoots in the room and offering clothing choices to start. The room was quite achromatic, so they briefly conferred before suggesting a black and white lingerie theme. We got to work against a suitably-lit wall, Katerina in white and Lee in black. The two of them work seamlessly together, although not always in perfect synchronicity – sometimes I had to discard a shot due to a mismatch in their poses, although each would have worked singularly. This is just because often each one couldn’t see what exactly the other was doing, and I wasn’t interjecting frequently to harmonize the scene. If I do another shoot like this in the future, even with two capable models who are comfortable with each other, I think this is something I’ll need to be more cognizant of.

After some initial standing-by-the-wall shots, I directed the now nearly-undressed ladies to the black leather couch, the only furniture in the room besides the bed, and we spent a good chunk of time there working different looks. Even though the small space made the working distances quite short, I still reached for my longer zoom to get some tighter compositions. The way they were posing and interacting was often sensual and intimate, demanding a close focus on their expressions and delicately posed hands. I also had fun shooting quite wide, exaggerating Katerina’s proportions and including the random objects and clutter of this weird little room. The walls, generally devoid of any artwork or other such décor, provided some texture and a neutral tone to keep the focus on the models.

Last stop was the bed, for which the girls discarded what remained of their lingerie for some art nude work before the hour was up. It was only at this point that I noticed just how extensive Lee’s tattoo is – as you can see, it’s an outlined floral scene that cascades down her right side, tracing lines down her thigh and even across her lower back. It’s quite striking – lovely, actually. “Some photographers don’t like it,” she offered, not yet sure whether I’m one of those photographers, given my reaction. I’ve heard this from nearly every tattooed model I’ve worked with – tattoos are a serious liability in the modeling industry – but I’m interested in portraying my subjects however they are, so it’s not a problem to me.

Anyway, back to the bed shots. This was the trickiest area for lighting, because it was closest to the windows, which did not have a sheer curtain to soften the sunlight. Like a light switch, the window light was on or off. I went with on given those options, but it meant that there was really just one well-lit area near the front of the bed. Unless, of course, some clouds obscured the sun, in which case there was no well-lit area on the bed. Again, I made peace with the scene and resolved to do what I could, envisioning these shots as a bit moodier, perhaps a bit dark, hopefully playing well in black and white. I did give a few directions now and then, just to get the girls cycling through a variety of looks before we had to wrap.

An hour wasn’t a lot with these two, but I think we all worked together quite well in the end. They asked to see the photos a couple times during the shoot (my favorite thing, you know! 😬) and were happy with what they saw, so I think we nailed it. All in all, then, a perfectly happy first time shooting two models. Top tip if you’re trying it yourself: find some professionals who already know each other, and if possible, hold out for a pair of Ukrainians.

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock Lee and Katerina's Full Gallery

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

MiMi, though, has elevated her aesthetic with the sheer boundlessness of her body art. I’d never seen anyone like her before, and for that reason alone I had to shoot with her. I reached out all the way back in February, knowing that I wouldn’t be in her area until July or August. She immediately got back to me, and we started to chat about setting something up.

We kept chatting throughout the intervening months, actually, and I had to do some tough negotiating to come to an agreement on what we’d shoot. MiMi insisted very early on that any nudes we shoot must be behind a paywall, and up to this point I hadn’t had any paywall enabled on the site at all. That was problem number one. Problem number two came a few months later when she messaged to let me know that she was no longer shooting nudes at all, so she could only offer me lingerie/fashion and/or boudoir styles. No matter how lovely and unique she is, I don’t have much use for those kinds of images here at Naked Prose. Not ready to give up on this opportunity, I pitched the idea of a half/half shoot of lingerie and nude, with only the lingerie photos appearing in the writeup. Any nudes would be behind a paywall, and this would be written into the commercial model release that we both sign.

She agreed! I had secured two hours of shooting time with this amazing woman. Next was sorting out the venue. She suggested a few studios in the Philadelphia area, but as an available-light-only shooter, I don’t really thrive in those kinds of artificial environments. We were at a temporary impasse, until she agreed to come out this way and shoot here in the apartment I had rented.

And that was the plan until the week before the shoot, when I had an idea. I was browsing the area on Google Maps when I was reminded of a venue nearby that would be an interesting location. It’s an underground speakeasy, lavishly decorated in silk and leather, and almost never open. Their website says they can host events, so I emailed the manager. She was happy to arrange for us to use the space, even after I said that it was a commercial art nude photoshoot, so I booked the place for us.

Now there was a new problem – how was I going to shoot in there? It’s incredibly dark, narrow, and cramped with furniture, not designed for photography in any way. I went in a few days early to scout the place out and confirmed that there was no way to do the shoot without external lighting. (No easy way, at least – perhaps I could have done something ambitiously artsy, moody, and dark?) I borrowed an LED panel and a softbox from a friend and committed to figuring it out on the day when MiMi was in front of me.

The day came, and I arrived early to get everything set up and sorted with the venue. I spotted MiMi as she was walking up the street and went to meet her. “Are you a hugger?” she tentatively asked me, having caught herself mid-lunge for an introductory cuddle. “Of course I am,” I assured her. She gave me a long, disarmingly genuine squeeze, and we made our way down to the speakeasy.

I’ve had this same experience several times now with expectation vs. reality: I worry that a stuffy professional model is going to strut in and be highly demanding, standoffish, aloof, impatient, intimidating… and they just never are. They’re nice women who happen to be beautiful and like posing for photos.

My experience with MiMi was that, but on steroids. She’s very experienced, very beautiful, and very famous – her Instagram account has over 100k followers. Her portfolio is full of dramatic, striking, stunning images taken by prominent photographers in places the world over. She confessed that she misses out on paid assignments because people find her intimidating. She thought out loud for a moment to explain it – is it the tattoos and piercings? her experience? her portfolio? It’s probably a little bit of everything. I’ll admit to being a little intimidated when I reached out to work with her.

Let this be an important public service announcement: MiMi Fulton is a complete and utter goofball. Warm, genuine, charming, adorable, sweet, thoughtful, excitable, and even more stunningly beautiful in person than she is in pictures. She’s an absolute gem of a human being, and everyone should work with her.

The shoot, as you can now imagine from my description of her, went off without a hitch. The external lighting was an… interesting experience? I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing with external lighting, nor did I really have any time to figure it out before it was go-time, so all I could manage to do was turn it on just below blinding-the-model level, point it at the scene, and move myself around it to get the shots. The static, consistent light source made things simple on the one hand, as I only had to set the white balance one time. But the consistency of the lighting was also a creative detriment, as all of the shots have the same kind of look to them. I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be done creatively with one LED light source, but that’s beyond my current level of experience. I accepted this limitation as a necessary condition for shooting in this unique (and perfect for MiMi’s look) location. I’m hoping that MiMi’s elaborate lingerie choices will spice things up and give some visual variety to the shots.

Since we were splitting the time between lingerie and nudes, I tried to keep an eye on the clock and keep things moving along in a methodical and sensible manner. MiMi and I were on the same page with wardrobe and location choices, which made everything very easy. We’d shoot for a bit, then I’d suggest we make a move, and she’d say “yup!” and ready herself for the next thing. When it was time to switch to nudes, she let out an excited “ooh, yay!” and scampered off to free herself from her elaborate blue lingerie.

The whole thing was a joy, honestly. Not just the shoot, but our conversations stretching back to February. We got along instantly and perfectly. The only thing I could possibly ask for now is more time with her – I definitely have not yet had enough of MiMi.

Hopefully you haven’t either! If you want to see MiMi in her fully natural state, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber. And keep an eye out for her in the future – I don’t think the book has closed on our creative collaborations…

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can download all of the images for this particular shoot by clicking on the button below.

Unlock MiMi's Full Gallery

This post continues for paid subscribers, who will have access to the full gallery at 4K resolution without watermarks. I can’t do this work without a supportive audience, so please consider upgrading to paid if you like my work and want to see much more of it.

Read more

I have only partial answers (at best) to these questions. What I do know for certain is what I’ve accomplished in my first year of Naked Prose. It’s been a huge expense of both time and money to get this Substack page off the ground, even if it’s hovering just a few feet above it. Still doing my non-photography full-time job during the week, I’ve been working on these posts almost entirely in my nights, weekends, and holidays. It’s been a bit like working a part-time job on the side, but one that actually costs me money.

Here’s what 2025 looks like at a glance: I shot my first model for the site in early January of this year, although I didn’t start posting regularly until May. Over the last 12 months, I’ve done 32 artistic nude photo sessions with 27 different models. I shot in Hong Kong, Thailand, Italy, the Philippines, and the US. In total, I paid more than $12,000 (USD) to models and studio locations to produce the work that you see here. At the time of writing, Naked Prose has just shy of 1,000 free subscribers.

It’s been great fun, I’ve learned a lot, and I’m very proud of myself for producing everything that’s on the site right now. I know I still have plenty more to learn, and I can only hope that my best work is still well in front of me. Today, though, I prefer to look back at the past 12 months of Naked Prose.

So here are 12 photos, one from a shoot that I did in each month of the past year, that I want to share and talk about. Enjoy, and please stick around for 2026!

January

I did three shoots in January this year, and they were all very important for me, if for different reasons. Here’s a shot of Ana, with whom I’ve now worked multiple times. I remember this shoot being in the late afternoon, so we caught the golden hour light coming in through the hotel window. I processed this image with a split orange/blue tone to emphasize the separation between Ana in the room and the city outside, and I really like how it turned out.

February

Only two shoots in February - one with Estonian model Amelia and this one, Niana in her hotel room. I like this shot because it’s something atypical of my work - I rarely get up close and crop in to focus on just a part of the model’s body. I don’t know what possessed me to do it in this moment; perhaps it was the way Niana’s hand caught my eye as she arched her back for this pose. I like how it turned out, so hopefully I remember to try more shots like this next year.

March

Three shoots in March, including this very memorable one with Nastya. She’s an absolute firecracker, this one - full of youthful energy and creativity. I quickly realized that I just needed to get out of her way and let her explore the room, trying everything that she fancied, including jumping on the couch. I had also been eyeing up this studio room for its colors, which remind me of Hopper’s Nighthawks. I’ve since worked with Nastya again - keep an eye out for her later in this post.

April

Two shoots in April, including this one with Merylin, one of the many Ukrainian ladies who came through Southeast Asia this year. This is from our second shoot together, which I shot on a mix of 35mm film and digital. This particular frame was shot on film, and although her face is a little bit dark, I really love everything else about how it turned out.

May

May was nuts. I had six shoots, four of which were in a single long weekend in Bangkok. There are way too many to pick from, but I’ve decided on this black and white shot of Cara Pin, who was the first of the Thai models I worked with that crazy weekend. I remember her being very easy-going and even easier to shoot - I’ve got a big pile of keepers from our session. I’m quite pleased with how this shot came out in monochrome.

June

June was much lighter - only two shoots, and one of them was the shortest I’ve ever done. It was also the only one I’ve yet done with two models at the same time, as you see here. Lee was traveling through the area with her model friend Kat, and she invited me to work with them. They could only give me one hour, though - that’s half the time I usually spend and with double the models. I agreed to do it anyway, and we managed to get plenty of great stuff despite the time crunch. If you’re looking for the full write-up for this session, please come back - I haven’t posted it yet. Hopefully this gives you something to look forward to in 2026!

July

July was the slowest month for me so far this year - I only had one shoot, but it was a memorable one with Stephanie. We did the shoot at her home, a historic three story farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. I remember it being hot and sweaty (summer, no central AC) and laughing a lot with Stephanie, who is as loquacious and ebullient as she is professional and experienced. We ended up in the cornfield across from her house at the end, as you can see. Expect this one in 2026 as well!

August

I did four shoots in August, although two of them were with the same model - Crystal, who you see above in all of her colorful glory. We had worked together for the first time just a couple weeks earlier, but it had gone so well that we agreed to shoot again before I left the area. I knew I wanted a change of venue, so I borrowed a friend’s house, which one might well mistake for a vintage-themed studio. Crystal had fun channeling pin-up vibes and grabbing accessories to accentuate her cheeky poses. Look for both of her shoots to appear on the site next year!

September

September was also very quiet with just one shoot, but it was with Nastya again (I told you she’d be back). I had always wanted to do a shoot in an abandoned industrial space, so I found one and booked it for us. It was a very different vibe this time, more serious and artsy given the environment, but Nastya still brought her usual energy. This session produced a wealth of lovely images, like this one, that I’m excited to share soon.

October

In October I traveled to Milan, where I did three shoots in professional studios with three different models. They were all great experiences, but I’ve chosen this shot with Ania to represent my time there. She’s the first Moldovan model I’ve worked with and was particularly unpretentious and kind in our interactions. Great conversations interspersed our photo work, which was just as fruitful, as you can see here!

November

Two shoots in November this year, one of which was with Yara, seen above in this striking black and white shot. What I remember most about this shoot was how absolutely not in the mood for it I was. I almost never shoot during my normal work week, as I said earlier, but this was one of the few shoots I had to schedule after working a full day at my normal job. I was tired and just wanted to go home. Yara, however, turned out to be a great model, and of course I enjoyed the shoot perfectly well once we got going. It was a much needed reminder to myself of how much I really do enjoy this.

December

Two shoots in December to round out the year: a second one with Cara Pin (from back in May, above) and one with Australian model Aim, the woman peeking through the sheer curtain here. What I remember most about our shoot was how she moved and posed: very flowing and dynamic, like a dancer or ballerina. She had so many ways to present herself to the camera that we had no trouble filling two hours in a small hotel room. Professionals like her make my job quite easy, and for that I’m always grateful!

So that’s it - 2025, the first year of Naked Prose, in review. A huge and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has liked, commented, restacked, and otherwise shared or interacted with my work. Paid subscriptions are coming in 2026 for those of you who want to see even more of it. As you can see from the second half of this post, I’ve still got quite a lot more to share!

Leave a comment

I was poking around on Model Mayhem for an upcoming long weekend in Bangkok, trying to find as much potential talent as possible to keep myself busy shooting content for Naked Prose, and I found Naksu. Obviously I had to try to get her on board – I mean just look how cute she is! When I reached out to her, a reply came back from the agency that handles her bookings. Yes, she’s available, and happy to work together, but there’s a rub: she doesn’t really speak English.

No matter! The agency has this covered. She will be accompanied by an assistant who will translate for her. Oh, actually, the head of the agency casually adds, the assistant is another one of their models, so I may as well just shoot both of them, back-to-back. I haven’t gotten this site off the ground by saying “no” to many opportunities, so I said, “what the hell? Send ‘em both over.” Two hours with Naksu first, with Xabarah there to facilitate communication, and then after a short break, Xabarah for another two. Ambitious, but I’m here to challenge myself.

I toyed around with the idea of finding some different shooting venues for this trip (because I ended up booking six models, five of whom actually showed up), but ultimately I decided against the faff of coordinating all of that in a city I don’t know in favor of a spacious hotel room that could offer me some choice and variety. Still, Naksu and Xabarah were models number three and four on the docket, so I had already done two full shoots in this hotel room before they showed up. Novelty was proving more elusive by the day.

I go down to meet the two of them in the hotel lobby, where Xabarah handles the pleasantries for both of them. Naksu, she tells me, is extremely shy.

I think this is one of the aspects of my craft that I’m weakest at – the initial get-to-know-you phase of the encounter. For I am also very shy, but I need to try not to be. Sometimes I get lucky, and the model is effortlessly chatty from the start; other times the model is Naksu, who wouldn’t say much to me even if she spoke English. Xabarah, it turns out, is the opposite – quite affable and extroverted – so the two of them are an effective pair.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Naksu and Xabarah, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

For today’s post, meet Laulau, who has come all the way from Paris on a little modeling tour of Southeast Asia. She’s not a native Parisian (which explains why she was generally pleasant and fun to work with 😉) but was born in the West African nation of Benin. She’s got to be the first… Beninite? Beninner? Oh fine I’ll look it up… Beninese (or in French, Beninoise) person I’ve met, and an unexpected nation of origin to add to my list of international models. I think she’s also the most famous model I’ve worked with to date, at least if Instagram counts – she has over 30k followers on her main account at the time of writing, although that’s for her fashion-focused work. (She posts things like nudes on her much smaller personal account.)

Not without good reason! She’s quite striking, talented, and widely published in fashion magazines. You’ll excuse me if I thought she had mistaken me for a more famous photographer when she reached out to schedule a shoot. I was also afraid (as I always am with models, I’ll admit it) that she’d be a bit stuffy, serious, demanding, aloof – this is a woman who has been working with professionals in the industry for years. What if she just hasn’t got the patience for me and my nonsense?

As always – I’ll learn this someday – I was wrong about the model. She was kind, talkative, helpful, engaged – all the things that models have tended to be, in my experience. That’s not to say the shoot went off without a hitch – far from it, in fact. First of all, when she came down to greet me in the hotel lobby (we agreed to use her hotel room for the shoot), she mistakenly grabbed a plastic card that wasn’t her room key, so we weren’t able to get back into the room without some help from the front desk. Once we made it to the room, another problem – payment. International models generally have no use for local currency, so I have to defer to whatever electronic payment method works for them. Usually it goes smoothly; this time it did not. I don’t know how long I spent faffing about with different online payment services – eventually I just had to shelve it so we could get going with the shoot.

Which was scheduled, I’ll add, from 5 PM on a weekday. At this point I’m still working a separate full-time job, so I tend to schedule my shoots on the weekends. This was the first time I had a shoot after working a full day at my “real” job, so I was already flagging a bit, and we had a limited amount of daylight to work with, given the late start.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Laulau, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

Bangkok shooting weekend madness continues with Donna, the only model I worked with on this trip who isn’t from Thailand. She’s from the Philippines but relocated to Bangkok recently for more modeling opportunities (among other reasons).

I’m doing all of these writeups in very quick succession (because I’m afraid I’ll forget all the details if I wait too long) and finding it difficult to make them all unique and interesting because, well, I shot five models in five days in the same room, so there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of variety in the experiences. I can tell you the two things that I’ll remember most about Donna, though. Maybe three things, yes – I’ll add in a bonus thing.

First of all, she prioritized the shoot and was hyper-respectful of our time agreement. Just to unpack that a little – I almost always book 2-hour shoots when I work with professional models. Mostly because they’re expensive and I can’t afford more than that, but also because when you work with a professional, you get shit done quick. If I don’t get what I need in two hours, that’s on me.

It’s fascinating, though, to see how each model understands those two hours. Some arrive well ahead of the scheduled start time so that they can be made-up and ready at the contracted start time, while others arrive at the start time and use the first 10-15 minutes to get themselves ready, eating into our shooting time. I don’t currently specify my expectation, so I get a variety of outcomes. Donna arrived at our start time, but she didn’t count any of our initial conversation (including her lingerie show-and-tell, a typical feature of these shoots) or her preparation time. When she came out of the bathroom ready to go, that’s when she started our two hours. I thought that was very conscientious and professional of her. She also wanted no part of signing the model release or collecting her payment at the beginning, even though that’s usually when I sort those things out (even if only because the contract says that’s what I’ll do). She held up her end of the bargain as well as any model could.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Donna, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

Hopefully you recognize Merylin, one of the many Ukrainian lasses I’ve had the pleasure of working with before. She’s now the second model I’ve been able to shoot a second time, so I wanted to try something different and not just recapitulate our first shoot. You might think that after my, ahem, less than successful film adventure with Niana, the first model I worked with a second time, I’d be put off that whole concept.

Thankfully you’d be wrong, as I am as stubborn as I am handsome. And modest. Yes, I had a rough go of it when I shot a roll of Portra 800 in that second shoot with Niana, but there are some ready explanations for that calamity. Actually Just one explanation, I guess – it was too dark in that room. It had no natural light at all, and even fast lenses and ISO 800 weren’t enough light-gathering power to give Portra all the photons it wants.

A much better situation with Merylin this time. Not only was I shooting the less-grainy Portra 400 rather than 800, but I rated it at 200 to overexpose it by one stop, and there was still enough light to keep the shutter speeds up. The increased ambient light also made focusing easier and more reliable, as I’m still shooting with just the two EF-mount lenses I have: the 24mm f/1.4L and TTArtisan 75mm f1/.5.

Of course I still managed to screw up a few of them, but there are many more keepers in this roll than in the last one. Best advice if you’re shooting Kodak Portra filmstock, then: bathe it in the best light you can find, and it will treat you well. Ignore this at your peril. This gives me a little bit of confidence to keep swapping film photography into these shoots – it really does add a bit of stylistic variety, and the fact that each press of the shutter has a particular cost associated with it (I’d calculate it to be about 70 cents a frame in America bucks, given what I pay for film and developing here) really makes me slow down and try to get it right. If you’ve never shot film before, it’s worth it just as a tool for sharpening up your attention to composition and exposure.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Merylin, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

I read a great article last week by Cedric at “I May Be Wrong” and wanted to use it as a jumping-off point to add my own commentary. I’m largely in agreement with his thesis and framing, even down to most of the details. His chronology absolutely describes my development as a photographer over the last 20+ years. I do have the occasional moment of departure from his assertions, though, so let’s get into it. I’ll quote from Cedric’s piece where appropriate and then add my two cents.

To begin, his thesis:

It seems that the majority of amateur photographers go through the same predictable journey that you can track through their gear. They begin their journey convinced that better gear will make them better photographers. Some end it knowing the opposite is true.

The last line is catchy, but I fear it’s a bit overstated – “the opposite” of the thought that better gear will make an amateur photographer better would be that better gear makes an amateur photographer worse, and I’m not sure I’d go that far. But let’s track though the four stages, as Cedric describes them:

Stage 1. Fresh-faced photographers start with whatever they can afford, which sometimes means second-hand gear that’s seen better decades, or the cheapest of the range.

This was absolutely my experience. My first two digital cameras were early compact point-and-shoot models – a Sony Cybershot and later a Fujifilm with a slightly higher megapixel count and optical zoom. My first DSLR kit was a Canon EOS Digital Rebel (probably the cheapest new model one could buy at the time) and two Sigma zoom lenses bought as a “starter” kit on eBay. I couldn’t afford anything better at the time, nor would I have known what to do with better stuff if I had it.

Stage 2. The tragedy is that most photographers are desperate to escape [Stage 1]. They spend hours scrolling through gear forums, convincing themselves that their limitations come from their equipment rather than their inexperience. They’re only partially right. Eventually, photographers scrape together enough money for their first “good” camera. Usually, it’s the most expensive thing they can justify buying. The bigger and more professional it looks, the better. … I remember the day I bought my first full-frame camera. It was the newly released 5D in 2007.

Check! I was on those forums, looking at images and reading other photographers’ experiences with different camera bodies and lenses. I upgraded from the amateur Digital Rebel to the prosumer 40D and some better EF-S lenses. Then, just like Cedric, I got a Canon 5D. I wasn’t able to get one when it came out (I think it was extremely expensive, probably more than double what the 40D cost), so I had to wait a couple years and get one second hand.

I felt like a proper photographer for the first time. The weight of it hanging around my neck was a badge of honour. This phase is about signalling as much as shooting. You want other photographers to know you’ve arrived. You want people to take you seriously. You want to belong to the club of people who own expensive things.

Because it was so long ago, it’s hard for me to remember just how much of the mythical lore surrounding full-frame sensors influenced my lust for the 5D. I’d love to think that I was above that sort of thing, but there’s no credible reason to think that I was – many of us did see the 5D as the aspirational (but mostly attainable, eventually) full-frame digital SLR. And I was elated when I finally got my hands on one. I also started pairing it with Canon L glass (a must for such a great camera sensor, surely!) and reveled in belonging to “the club of people who own expensive things.”

The irony is that this gear actually does improve your photographs, but not for the reasons you think. Better dynamic range and cleaner high ISO performance give you more technical flexibility. However, the real improvement comes from finally having equipment that doesn’t fight you at every turn.

I just want to mention one funny and contrarian quirk here about my move from the 40D to the 5D. (If you’re not familiar with Canon’s naming conventions and feel like 40 should be better than 5, they do it backwards: the cheapest models have 3 digits, the prosumer ones two, and the professional cameras just one.) Although the 5D had a much more capable sensor than the 40D, the latter was a much newer model and had some features that the 5D didn’t, most notably automatic sensor cleaning. The worst thing about the 5D (by a country mile) was that it was up to the user to keep the sensor free from dust, and, well, good luck. It was such a butt-pain that I can’t recommend picking up an original 5D to anyone – get the updated mark II version!

Stage 3. After a few years of lugging around professional equipment, photographers often pivot to vintage gear. Film cameras become particularly attractive.

Guilty! 😬 Medium format film cameras, no less! I had a few different Mamiya 645 models before I settled on the 645AF and a couple different lenses. I also had a Bronica RF645 rangefinder. I’ve now “downgraded” from 120mm to 35mm and have a Canon EOS 30V.

For some film photography suggests you understand the fundamentals. Vintage equipment implies you care more about craft than convenience. The photography community encourages this behaviour. Film photography is fetishised to an absurd degree. There’s an entire industry built around convincing photographers that digital is somehow inferior to analogue processes. It’s mostly nonsense, but compelling nonsense.

Generally defensible, in my experience. When I got into film I was already quite a mature digital photographer, so my reasons were much more my own than the result of external influences. Still, I am also the sort of person who loves a mechanical watch and has a record player, so I appear to be very susceptible to this compelling nonsense.

Stage 4. The final stage is when photographers stop caring about gear entirely. They realise that the best camera is the one you have with you, and the lightest camera is the one you’re most likely to carry. This realisation usually comes after years of missed shots because your camera was too heavy to bring along, or too conspicuous to use discreetly.

I can sign off on most of this. I certainly have not stopped caring about gear entirely, but I have doubtless slowed my pace of replacing or upgrading it compared to ten or fifteen years ago. I could write a thousand words agreeing with Cedric on the lightest camera being the one I’m most likely to carry: I’m the guy who sold all of his full-frame Canon gear over ten years ago to shoot with the comparatively dwarfish micro four-thirds system. I had the experience of having an amazing but expensive and heavy camera that I took to fewer and fewer places, and that eventually became too obvious an absurdity to ignore. Nor have I budged an iota on this conviction – I look at the size and weight of some of Canon’s new RF zooms and wonder who in the hell is lugging those bastards around. (And paying those prices!)

At this stage, The equipment becomes invisible. You stop thinking about aperture rings and focus peaking and start thinking about light and composition and timing. This is when you actually become a photographer rather than someone who owns cameras.

I do look for equipment that can become invisible – gear that does what I need it to do so that I can concentrate on the business of getting the compositions I want in the light that I need. But again, Cedric goes for the provocative soundbite when he invokes “actually becom[ing] a photographer”. I don’t think it’s possible (or useful to try) to tease out the necessary and sufficient conditions of photographer-hood. Yet I think I know what he means – it’s a meaningful distinction despite resisting definition.

It can take a very long time to reach this final stage. … Camera manufacturers release new models every year, each promising revolutionary improvements. Photography forums are filled with pixel-peeping comparisons and upgrade discussions. YouTube channels generate millions of views reviewing equipment that’s functionally identical to last year’s models. … The dirty secret is that cameras stopped getting meaningfully better 10 years ago. A ten-year-old camera can produce images that are indistinguishable from the latest models in most real-world situations (I defy you to find meaningful differences between a photo taken with a 15 year old 6D and one taken with a R6). The improvements are incremental and largely irrelevant to the actual practice of photography.

Ok, I think I have the most to quibble with in this section, but I’ll start off by reinforcing what is probably the most important point Cedric makes in his post, which is that a “ten-year-old camera can produce images that are indistinguishable from the latest models in most real-word situations.” I will happily stand next to him and shout this in the town square. In fact I’ll even go a step further and say that there’s little meaningful difference in quality among the major manufacturers. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, OM System, hell, throw Pentax in there – they’re all producing amazing overengineered equipment. Everyone’s lenses are tack-sharp, even those from third party manufacturers like Sigma and Tamron. Just pick one and go with it – it really doesn’t matter!

However, this does not mean that, on the whole, cameras “stopped getting meaningfully better 10 years ago” in my experience. This could be true in the full-frame market; I’ve never owned any full-frame mirrorless gear, so I can’t scrutinize Cedric’s assertion in that domain. In the micro four-thirds arena, camera bodies now include a whole heap of new features, most of which I would not voluntarily live without. Just off the top of my head: computational photography modes (hand-held high resolution, live neutral density filters, live composite), improved AF modes (automatic eye-focusing, starry sky autofocus, AI subject detection and tracking), stacked CMOS sensors, 4K cinematic video, pro capture burst mode… these are all things that I find extremely useful and that meaningfully expand the types of photos I can take with just a camera and lens. I would not settle for a 10-year-old micro four-thirds camera body; in fact I wouldn’t even work with more recent models that lack some of the aforementioned features. Perhaps this is micro four-thirds specific, but there’s still plenty of meaningful innovation in this format.

But there is of course a case for the necessity of going through these stages: what you learn at each stage is a prerequisite of successfully moving on to the next. If you don’t go through the gear buying stage, no matter how many times other people tell you buying stuff is pointless, you won’t believe it. You need to discover it for yourself.

Sad but true. Most people can’t be told not to do something they’ve already convinced themselves that they need to do, least of all a photographer with severe GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome – this is a real term that we use! 😅) I once tried to talk a very close friend out of buying an expensive Sony alpha camera and lens combo as his first “real” photo gear. He bought it anyway, and he’s only used it a handful of times in half a decade. Too heavy, valuable, and complicated to use most of the time, it was a giant waste of money, just as I told him it’d be. And yet! As Cedric says, some things we just need to discover for ourselves.

Make sure to give Cedric a follow if you enjoyed reading this, and I’ll see you all next week for another model writeup and photo post.

Leave a comment

I’m taking Niana’s return as a compliment – she reached out to me when she knew she was coming back and offered to work together again. I realize that I’m paying her, so it is not the height of flattery per se that she’s back again, but she is at least proof that working with me isn’t deal-breakingly off-putting. It’s the little things.

A quick sidebar and shout-out to the women like Niana who do this kind of work, because not all photographers end up on the call-back list. Earlier on the day of our shoot, she had to deal with an extremely last-minute cancellation from another photographer, who then blocked her when she expressed dissatisfaction with his behavior (she was already on the way to the venue when he cancelled.) After our shoot, she intended to walk by herself and with her suitcase to the location of the next one, a good 20 minutes away. When I found out that this was her plan, I decided to walk with her to make sure she at least got to her next shoot safely. This isn’t unusual for working models! They often travel by themselves, arranging and coordinating shoots on their own, sometimes getting hassled by immigration on the way in (a young woman traveling alone must be up to something), other times being treated unprofessionally by photographers once they’re there. Three cheers for these intrepid women, I say.

While it was great to have a model come back to work together again, I also felt an obligation to change things up and try a notably different kind of shoot the second time around. Our first one was very standard fare – her hotel room for the venue and my usual two camera/two lens combination. I ambitiously decided to change every single one of those previous conditions, so I booked a new studio room and brought a very different loadout of camera gear.

All of these changes posed potential challenges. The room, first of all, while it looked great in photos on the studio’s website, appeared not to have any strong sources of natural lighting. This turned out to be true; in fact the room was entirely lit by artificial light sources of varying temperatures and intensities. After shooting in the dark, this is probably the next worst lighting situation for me to work in.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Niana, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment

The change was announced in a note by Chris Best, CEO and co-founder of Substack, in which he gave his explanation for the change. It’s not a long note, so I can just quote the entirety of the relevant part here:

Part of why Substack is good is that it’s full of wonderful people who take out paid subscriptions to support work they value, and the people who produce it.

It also has other positive effects in the ecosystem. When people see you subscribe, you are creating a valuable signal that you are a real human and not a bot, and aiding in the fight against spam, trolls, and other problems that plague internet platforms. When you see someone who subscribes to the same thing as you, you have an instant connection.

That’s not a whole lot of explanation for what amounts to a fairly significant change, so Substack’s motivation for adding the badges needs to be extrapolated from what little official documentation there has been. One need not look much further than Substack’s business model, though - its sole revenue source is a 10% cut from paid subscriptions. (I think you can make the logical leap from there.)

I can’t speak to the validity of the “real human and not a bot” motivation, as I haven’t personally had any experience with bot troubles on Substack. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that Substack will not escape the proliferation of bots on its platform that is plaguing places like X (née Twitter), so perhaps it is useful to have a reliable visual cue that an account is not a bot. Of course, if this were the main goal, it could be accomplished without overtly referencing a user’s paid subscription status, so that’s clearly an ancillary benefit of the change at best.

The actual point of the badges, obviously, is to normalize paying for content on Substack. Less charitable commentators might say it’s to guilt, shame, or otherwise coerce people to pay for content, but I think this is a distinction without a difference. The platform can’t exist without paid users; this is how Substack avoids the well-established (and well-hated) ad-supported and algorithmic models of other large platforms.

And paid users are a tiny minority on Substack. To wit: according to SEO consultation firm AtOnce, only about 5% of the approximately 35 million active subscriptions on the platform are paid. Substack doesn’t release data at the level of individual users, but it’s reasonable to assume that the percentage of people who pay for at least one subscription is within shouting distance of that 5% figure.

What do I think about all of this?

Firstly, I am sympathetic to the privacy concerns. At the moment, there’s no way for users to control the display of the flower icon - if you have paid subscriptions, the icon will appear and indicate how many paid subscriptions you have. You can hide the names of your paid subscriptions from public view, but there is currently no option for users to hide the fact that they pay for content on the platform. (I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but I’m generally for giving users more control over their public-facing information rather than less.)

I also think it’s obvious that the change is meant to reward paid subscribers and shame those who don’t pay. I don’t know why this one little detail bothers me so much, but when you click on the profile of a paying subscriber, it says [username] subscribes. In italics. That italicization strikes me as a weirdly aggressive design choice, one that does more than declare something factually true about the user. I can easily see a non-paying subscriber reading it as, “[username] subscribes, why don’t you?”

This brings us to the accusations of classism, which I have to admit I have a hard time sympathizing with completely. It’s true that this new system deliberately creates an in-group/out-group dichotomy, and that’s always going to bother the people who get out-grouped. It’s also true that you need to pay to be a member of the in-group, and that will certainly make some people uncomfortable ipsō factō. (You can sense there’s a but coming…)

BUT!

To get the little flower next to your name, to be in the vaunted, celebrated, coveted in-group, all you have to do is be a paid subscriber to one Substack publication. The most common asking price for a paid Substack subscription at the time of writing is around $5 per month. Five American dollars. That’s about 1.3 gallons of gas (30-40 miles’ worth), or one fancy Starbucks drink. It’s less than a McDonald’s cheeseburger meal, or a month of Spotify Premium, or the cheapest Netflix subscription. Most of my readers are accessing Substack via the mobile app, which means they have a smartphone. The average monthly cell service bill in the US is around $70, so five bucks is about two days’ worth of service for the device you’re using to read this.

So what’s really going on?

Surely there are some people in America (where most of Substack’s audience resides) who legitimately do not have $5 in disposable income a month for discretionary spending. Thankfully, most Americans’ financial situation is not that dire; I suspect that many (most?) of the people denouncing the badge system (on the grounds that it discriminates against people who do not have $5 to spend on Substack every month) absolutely do have $5 a month to spend here, even if they say that they don’t.

While I do think that many people are being disingenuous and distorting the picture of Substack readers’ financial health, I also suspect that there is a legitimate cause underlying the backlash, even if it’s not being articulated: subscription fatigue. People have to pay monthly for too many things that they want to have access to, and there’s a tipping point for everyone, beyond which it becomes too much to add yet another monthly charge. I can absolutely see individual Substack subscriptions falling into that category. Most people could not afford to pay for all, or even most, of the content they subscribe to and read regularly on Substack.

If I may, the actual problem…

At the heart of this little tempest in a teacup, I believe, is a profound misunderstanding (and concomitant misuse) of Substack as a platform. For Substack is not a social media platform.

I’ll say it again for the ones who fell asleep (fair enough!) six paragraphs ago: Substack is not a social media platform. Nor is it a blogging site.

Many users, however, treat it like one, and that is a recipe for having a bad time on Substack. I have plenty of sympathy for people who make this error; after all, Substack sure looks like a social media platform sometimes. It has a ‘follow’ feature (à la X), a ‘subscribe’ button (à la YouTube), a personalized content feed, ‘like’ hearts, ‘restacking’ (i.e. retweeting), et cetera. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…”

But Substack is designed to be fundamentally different from social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok in one very important way - monetization. Substack’s business model circumscribes the most basic aspects of the platform, from how users get paid to who the platform is for. The creators of the site could not be more clear about this: Substack is a marketplace for creators who are encouraged to treat their work as a business and create content that their audience is willing to pay for. Paid subscriptions are the point. When you create a Substack publication, it is very clear from the beginning that the site expects you to turn on paid subscriptions at some point, because the site simply cannot exist without them.

Explicit comparisons to ad-supported models like Instagram and TikTok are important to hammer this point home. Instagram and TikTok need your eyeballs on their apps so that they can put targeted ads in front of them. This is why simple engagement with the app is currency on those platforms - they make money by selling your attention to advertisers. Individual creators can get paid based on how much of this engagement - likes, shares, comments - their content drives on the site. This incentivizes creators to post regularly, keep up with the algorithm, and make content that can go viral.

On Substack, the only currency is currency. As in fiat - you know, that $5 we spoke about earlier. Publishers do not get paid a penny from the platform for likes, restacks, comments, or reading time. A Substack publication with 100,000 free subscribers and millions of views would earn precisely zero dollars for the publisher and Substack. The only source of revenue for publishers through Substack is you, the person reading this. I hope you understand just how different that makes the place you’re hanging out in right now.

When I get a new free subscriber (which is all of my subscribers at the moment, since I haven’t yet enabled paid subscriptions - it’s coming!), I do smile and feel grateful, but I also worry a bit. Substack shows me what other publications each new subscriber also subscribes to, and in some cases it’s not just dozens, but over 100. If you’re subscribed to over 100 publications on here and not paying for any of them, dear reader, you have mistaken Substack for Instagram!

While we’re at it - we’re also not blogging here

Substack is also very much not a blogging platform like Medium or BlogSpot. Again, understandable confusion, since many publications here are individual people writing, but this ignores the fact that Substack is only actively courting people who want to curate an audience of loyal, directly-paying customers. Medium does not offer direct payments between readers and writers, and BlogSpot doesn’t have a payment system at all.

Adding to the mass confusion on both this point and the one above, I think, is the fact that many publishers are also guilty of misunderstanding and therefore misusing the platform. I want to be careful how I word this, because I can already sense some discontent with the charge of misuse. I think it’s perfectly defensible, nevertheless, to declare that writers who set up shop on Substack without any designs on the shop part have, like the readers I mentioned above, mistaken Substack for something else.

There are tangible negative impacts of misusing the platform in this way (i.e. treating it like a free blogging site). First of all, Substack foots the bill for hosting publications and delivering content via email, to say nothing of the operational and marketing costs of running the company. They pay for all of this (as far as I know) by taking 10% from paid subscription fees. If you have no paid subscribers (and have no intention of ever having any, for whatever reason), your publication generates zero revenue and is being subsidized by people (like me) who are paying for other people’s content.

Secondly, giving away all of your content for free reinforces the misconception that Substack is the place to go for unlimited free content (like Instagram), which, as I think I’ve mentioned fourteen times by now, it very much is not. This is why so many Substack users react with surprise (and consternation!) when they’re reminded by a little icon that it’s a place for paying customers.

Thirdly, and perhaps most nefariously, publishers who give all of their content away for free make it harder for others to sell their own. Readers will (fairly) ask why they should pay publisher B for her writing when publisher A writes in the same genre and offers up all of her work for free. To be clear, the lesson here is not that free content is morally reprehensible, it’s that Substack was expressly designed for people who want to sell their content. If you don’t ever want to sell your content, that’s great too - you can distribute it through other platforms that have different business models.

Substack allows free subscribers and publishers, and that’s ok too, paradoxically

One way that Substack is different from platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans is that it doesn’t ever require that anyone sell or buy content. At the risk of contradicting myself, or at least undercutting my previous points, I should point out that free subscribers and publishers are still welcome in the Substack model. It’s a good thing that publishers can decide what content they want to offer for free and what is only for paying customers. Free content is the obvious way to begin for new creators who are trying to build an audience - readers won’t be willing to pay for content that they can’t sample first.

This is precisely how I’ve been running my Substack publication since I launched it, so I completely understand and support this use of the site. I am also scheming in the background to enable paid content for those who want more, and that’s why I’ve chosen to spend most of my time here on Substack rather than trying to make money on the ad-supported social media sites.

Wow I wrote too much, sorry

In sum!

• Substack’s business model requires paid subscribers for the site to exist.

• Substack is always going to prioritize and promote its paying customers.

• Some people are pretending to be mad about the paid badges because they don’t have $5, when actually they’re mad for different (but also perfectly understandable) reasons.

• Many readers (and even publishers) treat Substack like an ad-supported social media site or blog, which leads to confusion and misuse of the platform.

• I am not good at expressing myself concisely.

After all that, would you believe that I even left some stuff out? I’ll fill in those blanks when I finally launch a paid tier for Naked Prose. As always, thank you for reading - please feel free to yell at me in the comments if something I’ve said is completely stupid or offensive to you.

Share Naked Prose

Leave a comment