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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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.

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In the spirit of stubbornness perseverance, I decided not just to continue my trend of shooting film when I work with a model for a second time but only shoot film. That’s right – I didn’t snap a single digital image (other than a few with my phone for Instagram) during our shoot. I brought one roll of Kodak Portra 400, one roll of Portra 800, and my Canon EOS 30V. I also shot the entire session with one lens, the EF 24mm F/1.4L. This sounds even crazier now that I type it all out, but that’s what I did.

Why am I doing this to myself, when shooting digital is much easier, cheaper, and more reliable? That’s a great question. Actually, I’m going to need to think about it for a minute and get back to you. In the meantime, have a look at Ana.

Ok, I’m back. I think there are a couple of reasons why I do this to myself. First of all, shooting with film is just fun. I didn’t grow up with film photography, so I find the analog nature of it charming and novel. I have a similar feeling about vinyl records: I grew up with the sterile digital perfection of CD audio and appreciate the warmth and imperfection of an LP. Film photography is also challenging, and I’m still a photographic challenge-seeker even after a couple decades of experience behind the lens. If you grew up in the digital camera age like I did and want to be humbled, go shoot some film. We are spoiled with all of our microprocessors and software, but it can be hard to notice that unless it’s all taken away.

I’m not even setting the difficulty level that high – the 30V has a light meter, the lens autofocus. I’ve even programmed the body to use back-button AF like my digital cameras, keeping the user experience consistent between formats. What’s the problem, then? Well, you need to meter very carefully and understand how to shoot a particular film stock to get the results you want. Kodak Portra, for example, needs a lot of light to be happy, so I rated both rolls at half of their box speeds (shooting the 800 roll at 400 and the 400 at 200) and still dialed in some positive exposure compensation for particular shots. If you underexpose Portra, your results are going to be trash, and there’s little to nothing you can do after the film is developed to save it. It’s also comically easy to completely ruin a roll of film in the loading/unloading and handling process. This is pretty close to fool-proof with 35mm canisters, but when I loaded the roll of 400 and shut the film door, I wasn’t sure that the camera had advanced the film correctly, so I opened it to check and instantly torched the first two frames of that roll. You’d think I’d know better than that at this point, but… you’d be wrong.

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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Another day, another new nationality in my model Rolodex: meet Cara (IG: @cara.pin), the first Thai model I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Not her real name, mind you, but having seen her Thai name, I am quite confident in my inability to pronounce it, so she’s Cara to you and me. A small-town girl several hours removed from the chaos of Bangkok, she eventually moved to the big city for more economic opportunity. Modeling is her side hustle – her real job is in the clothing industry – but she knows the window is limited for this kind of work, and she loves it.

This is a part-business, part-pleasure trip for me, so I booked a hotel that’s equal parts comfortable and suitable for several model shoots, because boy am I cramming them in on this trip. Work/life balance be damned! I won’t say which hotel, but it turns out it’s the one where The Hangover Part II was filmed. I did not know this prior to booking, but the staff here point it out at every opportunity, so I’m going to assume that it’s true.

Right, so, shooting conditions – what have we got? The only source of natural light is the outside-facing part of the room, which opens to a balcony overlooking the Bangkok skyline. I’m on the 58^th floor, eye-level with some clouds and occasional light aircraft. Sounds swanky, I know, but I think every single room in this place has a balcony, so not only are we not special, but we also have neighbors in each direction, as far as the eye can see.

A true professional, Cara is undeterred and immediately wants to know if we’re going to shoot out on the balcony. Of course we are. It’s one of the reasons I chose this hotel amidst strong competition from others in the area. The good news (question mark?) is that the balconies are pretty useless, so guests tend not to spend much time out on them. Cara informs me that somebody jumped many years back, so the hotel has very much de-emphasized the balconies since then. (This must have been a tough decision for the hotel, as you will understand if you look up a picture of it.) Anyway, if you sign a waver they’ll unlock the balcony door for you, but there’s nothing out there except two condensers for the air conditioning.

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 Cara, 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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