Crystal and I had such a great time working together that we both immediately wanted to do it again before I left the area. I have a great time with almost every model I shoot, so it’s common to exchange the “we should work together again!” sentiment as we part ways, but with Crystal it seemed much more urgent and intentional – more like “we need to do this again soon.” And so we did!

As with any model I work with a second time, I’m always searching for something different. Often that means I shoot with film instead of digital the second time, which instantly makes everything quite different. Unfortunately I didn’t bring any film photography gear with me during my summer travels, so that option was out. Change of venue, then? I had just the place – a close friend’s house.

“My house is a disaster,” she declared when I raised the possibility with her. And to her, it certainly is, but it’s a beautiful disaster, so I persisted. Eventually she got around to dusting off a few places to her satisfaction and opened it up to us. I knew, though, that in truth we could probably shoot all over the house, because it’s cluttered with stuff that’s colorful and interesting. As long as I get a handful of great shots that I can share with all of you here, I’m not fussed about what else we get up to, especially when I’m working with a model for a second time.

The vibe for this shoot, then, was much freer, lighthearted, sassy. Crystal fell in love with the place within two seconds of stepping through the door and understood what the assignment was. Bright colors, big smiles, pin-up style poses. The only thing I told her to bring along, in fact, was some racy lipstick – I knew we’d have everything else we needed immediately at hand.

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 Crystal, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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I had just gotten back from Milan a day and a half earlier (a 7-hour time difference) and had worked a full day at my “real” job. I didn’t even have time to stop at home first – I had my camera gear with me at work and took a taxi directly to the model’s hotel when I clocked out. A model, incidentally, that I wasn’t even all that excited to work with, because (yeah, I’ll say it) I thought she was a bit too skinny for art-nude work. Oh, and the shoot was in the late afternoon, so I knew I would run out of daylight at some point in the middle of it, leaving me with whatever lighting was in the hotel room.

Suffice it to say, then, that I was not in the fucking mood to do this shoot. Nor did things improve when I got up to the room. She commenced the usual show-and-tell, spreading her many lingerie options out on the bed. She was kneeling by the side of the bed while she did this, so I knelt down on the other side (it felt weird to be standing over her). “Oh no, don’t do that!” she said, sounding a bit concerned. I have no idea what I did or why it was a problem, but I immediately felt bad and had no idea what to do to fix it. I froze and did nothing, just letting her get on with the underwear show, which she thankfully continued. (I still have no clue what that was about!) She sounded eager to get on with things, asking me almost as soon as I got through the door what I wanted her to wear and where we should start. My mood sank even further, afraid that she wasn’t interested in between-scenes chit-chat. Chit-chat that I, as a massive introvert, need to make myself feel comfortable with a stranger. This one was trending pear-shaped before it even got going.

I am many things, but I am not a quitter. I paid for this shoot, I need it for the experience (and for the photos for you, dear readers), so I’m doing the damn thing. I suggested some black lingerie to start and directed the model – whose name is Yara by the way, and it turns out she’s lovely – over to the only window in the room. It was now 4:30 PM on a completely overcast day in November, and there was a towering building just opposite the one we were looking out from, so you can imagine what pitiful, piddling light was making its way onto Yara, even with curtains tossed fully open. And it was only going to get dimmer by the minute.

I peered through the viewfinder and assessed the situation. Wide open at f/1.7, it’s already looking like ISO 800, maybe 1600. (If you don’t speak digital sensor light sensitivity, that means that the room had about eight times less light than I’d like.) This would normally annoy me, but I was so pre-annoyed by this point that I just cranked the ISO up and got over it. I was about to get started, when I remembered to ask about music – most models like to have something on while they work.

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 Yara, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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The thing is, though, the reason that I’m a photographer (and I know this is weird) is that I just really enjoy taking pictures.

And I don’t mean creating art via the medium of photography. I mean holding the camera up to my face, looking through the viewfinder, and working all the dials and buttons. I appreciate the technical challenge and opportunities that photography, in all its forms, offers me. When I see a photograph that demonstrates some new technique or variety of photography that I’ve never seen before, my immediate instinct is to try to do it myself. Not to master it, per se, but to learn about how it’s done, and prove to myself that I can do it.

So here’s just a little taste of my personal photographic ADHD, a photo essay that I dedicate to all of you out there who refuse to be pinned down to a genre, a style, a focal length, or a medium.

Exhibit A: Film

When I finally got into film photography in 2021 (thanks, COVID), I didn’t just pick up a Canon AE-1 and a 50mm f/1.4 like a sensible person. Oh my, no. My first film camera was a Mamiya 645 1000S, which I traded in for a 645 Super, and then finally a 645-AF. I also had a Bronica 645 rangefinder (that shot in portrait orientation). And an Olympus Pen-F half-frame camera. Now I’ve sold all of those and shoot 35mm film with a Canon EOS 3 - one of the weird models with eye control AF, obviously.

Exhibit B: Lenses

You name a niche lens, I’ve probably at least been tempted to try it. Fisheyes (both circular and rectilinear), anamorphic cinema lenses, tilt-shift, some Lensbaby offerings thrown in for good measure… I’ve played around with all of these, sometimes even selling them only to reacquire them again years later. (I’ve had a shift lens not once, not twice, but thrice so far - two for digital cameras and one for the Mamiya.)

I am the opposite of the photographer who walks around with only a single standard prime lens affixed to his camera. Photo walk? Great! I’m carrying two bodies with a fast zoom attached to each one, because I’m going to photograph everything: landscapes, architecture, that weird looking pigeon - all of it, and I’ll be annoyed if I don’t have the proper focal length to do it. I have eleven lenses that I can use with my digital cameras at the moment, and yes, I need all of them.

Exhibit C: Subjects

At no point in my 20+ years of photography had I focused on any one genre or subject before I started regularly shooting art-nude content for this site. While that’s the bulk of what I shoot these days, I still travel and shoot all kinds of different things while I’m away. Of course I do naturally gravitate towards a few very common photographic subjects (landscapes and architecture as two examples), but I’ve also spent considerable time photographing completely different things. Things like…

Concerts!

I’m a bit of a metalhead, and I’ve managed to get myself photo access on a few occasions, so I’ve photographed some metal shows.

Motorsports!

I’ve been a fan of dirt track racing for a good 15+ years, and these clamorous and chaotic events are where I learned how to do high speed panning.

Regular sports!

I’ve shot both indoor and outdoor sporting events, from professional baseball to wrestling - including the sumo variety.

Wildlife!

While I haven’t managed to train myself in bird-in-flight style nature photography (that seems like it would take just a bit more time than I’m willing to devote to learning it), I do love capturing slower-moving creatures of all types, big and small. I particularly love puffins and am chasing them around the world.

Exhibit D: Styles and Techniques

Nor do I limit my scattershot behavior to subjects and gear. If I get a new camera and it has a new feature, you bet I’m trying it. Olympus/OM-System cameras have been introducing (and improving) different “computational photography” modes that allow for some pretty impressive images to be created entirely in-camera, and I’ve tried them all.

I’ve also really leaned into panoramic landscapes, going so far as getting a nodal slide to eliminate parallax when I stitch multiple shots together in post.

Of course I have to mention macro photography, which I can remember trying as far back as the mid-2000s with my Canon 5D and a borrowed Sigma 105mm macro lens, the combo used to take this photo. ⬇

I’ve already written a whole guide here about how to photograph flowers with a macro lens, but I’ve also trained my close-up optics on other things too, like mechanical watch movements, which really need to be seen up-close to be appreciated.

Perhaps the most experimental and avant-garde flavor of photography I’ve tried so far is Intentional Camera Movement (ICM), sometimes called “kinetic” photography. This generally involves moving the camera in some way during the exposure, adding some intentional blur to the image. The main way that I’ve tried this is turning the zoom ring during a long exposure, like this:

I didn’t feel like there was a whole lot for me to explore in this kind of photography, but I’ve seen some very creative uses of this technique from other photographers here on Substack, so maybe I’ll revisit the idea.

In sum: There’s no Wrong Way to be a Photographer

If you’re a photographer of any kind - professional, casual, or even just aspiring - ask yourself why you picked up a camera the first time. That answer will be personal to everyone. Some will say, “to capture something beautiful,” others, “to convey emotion through light and shadow.”

For me, though, the honest answer to that question is, “because I wanted to play with it.” I embraced photography because I embraced the camera - not as an instrument to paint with light, but as a gadget. A collection of circuits and ground glass that can be used to document the infinite expanse of human experience, if only I could figure out how to do it. The figuring out part was the hook.

I have evolved since those early days, of course. I do view my camera as a tool for artistic expression, and I do believe that I capture beauty and convey emotion, especially in my artistic nude work. I’m proud of it, and I feel a touch of the profound when I capture something truly striking.

But there’s room too for the mechanically-minded, those of us who are as impressed by the technology itself as by the work that talented people produce with it. It’s a bit like buying a guitar, not because you have a song inside you that you need to sing out to the world, but because you like amps and cabinets, effects pedals, alternate tunings, the whammy bar, and digital audio workstations. The process, that is, rather than the product.

To put an even finer point on it: it’s ok to pick up a camera even if you don’t have anything to say creatively. You do not need intention, vision, or voice. Your reasons are your own, and they are valid.

Go forth, then, my fellow jack-of-all-trades photographers, and without diffidence, hesitation, or apology, photograph every damned thing.

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When I started doing this whole business of shooting art-nude photos (and trying to make a whole business out of it), I was aware that there were lots of things I didn’t know. One thing I didn’t know that I didn’t know (as Donald Rumsfeld might say) was how crucial a handful of Ukrainian women would be in filling the first year of my shooting calendar. A full third of my shoots thus far have been with models hailing from that beleaguered would-be NATO ally.

Today’s shoot is with Merylin, my first three-time art-nude collaborator. If you’ve been following my work, you’ll have noticed that I like to mix things up a bit when I work with a model for subsequent shoots; one of my go-to methods for doing that is just to shoot part or all of the session on film. In fact that’s what I did with Merylin the last time we worked together. You may be thinking, then, that for our third shoot, I’m going to go to NASA’s STScI control center and shoot her with the James Webb telescope, or some other such absurdity.

Happily, I have learned not to push my luck quite that far. Our first two shoots were in hotel rooms (the default in this business), so for this third occasion I felt it was change enough to book a studio space to work in. No film, no weird gimmicks or arbitrary self-imposed restrictions, just a change of scenery. That decision wasn’t necessarily without its challenges, but it was decidedly less masochistic.

The only problem, really, was that the green studio room I booked was a bit on the dim side for my liking. Quite a bit better than the red room I used with Niana, but not nearly as bright as some of the other studios I’ve used. I love all of the earth tones and wood textures, but this space eats up more light than it gives back. The greenhouse area seemed to be an exception, so that’s where Merylin and I began.

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.

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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.

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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.

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 Nastya, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.

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 Natasha, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.)

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 Ania, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.

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 Ivy, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.

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 Crystal, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.

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 Stephanie, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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“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.

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 Lee and Katerina, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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.

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 MiMi, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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