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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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.)

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

So we get to the room, and Naksu gets settled while I talk to Xabarah about the shoot: what I’m looking for, how I tend to work, where in the room we can try some different things. I ask if Naksu really doesn’t speak English, because she’d be the only Thai model I’d booked who doesn’t, and it hadn’t been difficult to find locals in Bangkok’s many bars, restaurants, and massage venues who did as well. It turns out she does in fact understand and speak some English – she would just rather not because, well, she’s extremely shy. (I think I got hoodwinked into shooting two beautiful Thai models when I only asked for one! Darn the luck!)

Naksu emerges wearing a cute pink bra and underwear set, which looks great on her and adds a nice dash of color. I have been relatively strict on shooting artistic nudes in all of my sessions for this site, but given that I was shooting five different models in this one hotel room, I quickly learned that variety would need to come from many different sources, one of those being wardrobe, so I left her in it and directed her to the bed. Xabarah did her best to recapitulate our conversation about expectations in Thai, and when Naksu seemed to give the green light, we got to work.

Cute though her undies may have been, I’m not shooting for Victoria’s Secret here, so she worked her way out of them after a couple dozen poses on the bed. That would be it for clothed shots of Naksu, but I’m glad to have a few that are a little different from the rest. A brief stop on the floor next to the bed, where the light from the balcony doors shines brightest, and then out onto the balcony itself.

This was one of the features that sold me on this particular hotel. Ultimately it was a serviceable shooting location, one that I never hesitated to use with each model, but it wasn’t without its challenges. The balcony of the floor above perfectly covers the one below it, so a model even pressed up against the railing will still be in shadow when she faces into the room. (This is, to be fair, the sort of thing easily fixable with a reflector and an assistant, neither of which I had with me.) Its semicircular shape also hindered shooting the models from the side, and for some reason a rather sizable condenser unit for the room’s AC was unhelpfully sitting on each side. And then there was the issue of neighboring rooms – these are not private balconies – of which there were several to the left and to the right. Thankfully the models mostly didn’t care about this, and I suppose given their line of work that shouldn’t be surprising.

Oh, I almost forgot the worst part about the balcony – it’s farking hot in Bangkok. My metal camera lenses, chilled by the frosty AC indoors, immediately fogged up upon contact with the swampy Siamese atmosphere, necessitating an acclamation period every time I dared to venture outside. The models, of course, are consummate professionals, and get to work out there with nary a complaint. Xabarah, I think because she didn’t have much to do once we got going, dragged a chair onto the balcony for Naksu and started to direct her posing. (Models can be very creative people, so when they get an idea, I roll with it.)

Back inside, the next destination was the huge sliding mirror that closes the bedroom off from the rest of the suite. (For if there is a mirror, I will stick a model in front of it.) Not only is it nearly floor-to-ceiling, it also moves several feet laterally, allowing for a bit more creative freedom and background selection. Naksu seemed to know what to do with it without much direction, so as she twirled about, I moved hither and thither to find the angles for the best shots.

My last stop with Naksu was the living room, which gets zero natural illumination and only meager and incongruous artificial. When I first stepped through the door upon arrival, my immediate thought was, “well, I’m probably not going to be using this space for anything.” My second thought, thankfully, was, “it’s going to be a real slog shooting five models with just a bed, a mirror, and a balcony, so I’d better suck it up and figure something out.” Again, I don’t carry any off-camera (or even on-camera, for that matter) lighting with me, so all I have to work with are the lights in the room.

One of the solutions I worked out was putting one of the chairs directly under a single overhead spotlight, which created quite a dramatic and contrasty scene. One of the models likened it to an interrogation scene in a movie. It wasn’t nearly as daunting to shoot as it seemed: use custom white balance for the light temperature, bump up the ISO to 1600, use spot metering, and watch the histogram. With those adjustments, I was able to shoot rather freely, and so I did with Naksu, who shuffled herself around gracefully while I framed and snapped until her time was up.

After she was dressed and packed, she wanted to go out to the balcony and take some photos of the view with her phone. Xabarah made her ask me in English if she could, and it probably won’t surprise you that she had no trouble expressing herself perfectly comprehensibly.

We all took a break at this point – Naksu to go home, Xabarah to have a cigarette, and me to try to figure out what I could possibly do differently in the next two hours. Here’s an idea that I had all too late: close the solid curtains most of the way, directing a band of hard light through the balcony doors. That would have been good, had I only thought of it. D’oh!

I guess there’s no real concern that you’ll get the two of them confused, since Xabarah has dark hair and several prominent tattoos. She said they’re actually a liability in the modeling world; her manager has begged her not to get any more. They’re an important part of her though, as they tend to be for anyone, so I always ask when models have them. It’s all a bit too personal to reveal here, but Xabarah’s are a window into her life story and her personality for sure.

Inevitably Xabarah’s shoot was going to be at least partly like Naksu’s, just with her own poses and expressions, so I’ll focus on the things that stood out to me as unique. The experience of working with her in general was quite different, given how open and talkative she is. I got to know her much better than I could Naksu, obviously. Xabarah loves to be naked; in fact she says that she feels more like herself, more comfortable when she’s able to make art with her body. She feels something almost religious about the female form and its role in bringing beauty into the world; being a conduit for that is its own reward to her.

As for the shoot, I let her crawl around on the desk by the wall, which was still lit well enough by the balcony doors to be useful, and the desk had a slightly polished, mirror-like finish. I haven’t counted frames, but I feel like I reached for the 20mm anamorphic (the w i d e s c r e e n one) more often with Xabarah than with Naksu, although I used it in every shoot I did on this trip. I guess something about her just seemed a bit more cinematic. We skipped the chair on the balcony part, nor did we do any work with the giant sliding mirror. To be fair, it was the end of a three-shoot day in the same hotel room for me, and I was running on creative fumes, just trying to get some great stuff with this goddess-energy Thai woman.

We switched up the spotlight and chair scene quite a bit, invoking a different style and energy. She went full-edgy with the wardrobe: black lingerie with stockings and audacious heels. I gave her the smaller chair to work with, feeling that the neutral tones were more suitable for the scene and the shape less inviting of relaxed, lounging poses. Toss in a bit of Xabarah’s attitude and I think we created something fully her own.

And that was it! Two models, four hours, and several hundred photos, carefully curated and presented here for your appreciation. Thailand, you’re alright.

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

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

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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.

Eventually we did get going, and things went pretty smoothly thereafter. Laulau selected some white lingerie to kick things off, and we got to work. The room was big by Hong Kong standards, which is to say that it was what passes for a regular hotel room in much of the rest of the world. “The room is a normal size, not very big,” Laulau noted when we walked in. “Normal size in Hong Kong is big,” I countered, to which she added, “same in Paris!” We talked a lot about our two adoptive home cities, noting a not-insignificant number of similarities. It was interesting to hear her take on Paris as a francophone who grew up in a very different place.

Anyway, we worked a fair amount on and around the bed area, which had adequate space to move but an inordinate amount of background clutter. A certain amount of this is unavoidable in hotel rooms, but I always try to move or hide any environmental distractions that aren’t nailed down. In this case, on each side of the bed was a large black reading lamp and a bevy of (also black) light switches that couldn’t be moved or easily covered. The wall behind the bed also had three different sized, asymmetrically arranged paintings. I generally don’t go as far as removing wall decorations in hotel shoots, but I can’t say that I wasn’t tempted. These distractions are getting easier to remove with software by the day, yes, but that takes time, time that adds up if you need to do it in a couple dozen images. As ever, better to get it right in-camera.

On the whole, I’d say that the bed-focused stuff we got was good. The room had a pleasing array of warm tones that complemented Laulau’s skin tone nicely, and the late-afternoon sun shone obliquely through the large window to the left of the bed. Along that window, which ran the length of the room, was a desk and a long padded window seat, which offered the only other obvious place to shoot.

I had left the window uncovered up to this point to admit maximum photons, but as Laulau took a position on the window seat, I decided that the plainly visible scene flanking her was too busy and distracting to include in the frame, so I fully lowered the sheer curtain. This completely transformed the mood of the scene and offered a great contrast to the warm, even light from earlier.

Knowing that this was probably the only other look I was going to get from this room, I threw everything I had at it. I got in close to work with the wide zoom, I backed away to compress the scene with the tele zoom. This was a great setting for silhouettes, so I asked Laulau to use more demonstrative, flowing poses to accentuate her contours. The heavily diffuse light was also quite pleasing for portraits, so I sat in front of her and used the window as a giant softbox, grabbing some tighter shots. I eventually swapped the zooms out for an anamorphic cine lens and a longer manual focus portrait lens to get a wider variety of looks with this light.

It certainly wasn’t the easiest shoot to get going, but by the end I think we found a groove and got some great stuff. Laulau was easy to work with, and great to talk to along the way. We had fun taking turns hitting skip on the YouTube ads that kept interrupting the music streaming on her laptop – it seemed to get funnier every time it jarringly silenced the deep house tracks she had selected. I think one of the more underrated skills photographers need to develop is adaptability, and I’m embracing that challenge with every shoot. Art from adversity, as they say, whoever they are.

Until next time! Please do share my work with others who you think might enjoy it.

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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.

Secondly, she focused on her social media needs more than any model I’ve yet worked with during the shoot. I mean this in a good way, because it reminded me that I need to be doing way more on that side of things to grow my audience and show people what I’m doing here. She had a little tripod for her phone, and she filmed several time-lapse videos of our shoot. At the end, she flipped through the images on the LCD of both of my cameras and snapped some quick shots of her favorites with her phone. This is probably the sort of thing I would have rolled my eyes at in another context, but most of the models I work with are active on Instagram, and some have rather large followings. So if you’re used to seeing quick little snaps of the models I’m currently working with on IG, you can probably thank Donna for reminding me not to neglect self-promotion. (If you’re looking for her, sadly she’s taking a bit of a break from social media for the moment, so I can’t link to her IG.)

And the bonus thing – she had the idea of the scarf-toss on the balcony. It seemed a little bit cliché when she pitched it to me, but I was probably just anxious because it’s a different kind of photo that I hadn’t planned for. (A peek into my brain: “Oh no, what shutter speed do I need to freeze the scarf? Should I switch to Sv? Do I need to increase the ISO? Should I use a burst mode? The faster one or the slower one?”) She was right, it looked great, and I’m totally stealing that idea for future shoots.

The shoot was as good as you’d imagine with such a dedicated professional. We grabbed some shots on the bed with her in and out of some green lingerie, by the balcony doors in black, out on the balcony with the sheer red wrap (Donna labeled one of these as the “money shot”), and in the living room under the spotlight. (Her leather-clad poses are looking a little BDSM under that spotlight, aren’t they?) She also insisted that she wear a skimpy crocheted bikini that a friend of hers made, so that she can help to promote her work. Creatives helping other creatives.

So that’s Donna, my not-Thai model of the weekend. More to come from old Siam, so stay subscribed and don’t miss out!

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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.

I shot the film roll first before picking up the Twins to cover the rest of the session digitally. This wasn’t an intentional decision, but as I reviewed the images later, I noticed that I shot way more with the 10-25mm than with the 25-50mm. I do tend to shoot more with the wider zoom, but it’s not normally so heavily favored. It was like 5:1 this time. I chalk it up to working in a relatively small space and the adequate coverage of the wide-zoom (a 20-50mm in full frame terms) to get what I wanted without having to pick up the longer lens.

So, what did we have to work with? More than usual for a Hong Kong hotel, thankfully. The large window let in plenty of light, and the eye-catching cityscape outside offered the possibilities of shooting with and without the sheer curtains obscuring the concrete jungle. With my back to the window, there was plenty of great light to put Merylin into, both in a chair and in front of or on the bed.

With all of the standard and obvious stuff covered, we ventured away from the safety of daylight and tried a few different things further afield. Hotels almost always have a few mirrors, so I never miss an opportunity to play with them when I shoot. (We did something similar in Merylin’s last shoot, you’ll recall.) Actually, she saw herself in the mirror when she was on the bed and wanted to grab a cheeky self-portrait, which I’ll happily share with you here. (Hopefully she doesn’t mind me passing off her creative work as my own.)

I don’t normally shoot in hotel bathrooms. Let’s just get that out up-front. They usually have no natural light, which is a near deal-breaker for me, and they’re cluttered up with little appliances, fixtures, signs, toiletries, and whatever the model has (understandably) strewn about the various surfaces while she’s, you know, living in that space at the time. I’m quite allergic to having the background of my frames cluttered with crap that I have to move or ask software to remove for me in post.

In the spirit of doing things differently with this shoot, and given that the light was fairly neutral, and the shower had a nice monochrome tile pattern, I thought, “eh, what the hell?” I knew we already had banked some great stuff, so I embraced the wide end of the 10-25mm and got a little crazy with the angles in the shower. Given that there are a couple shots that I liked and I didn’t fall and injure myself or the model, I’m declaring victory.

Merylin isn’t planning to be on my side of the world much anymore, so this might be the last you see of her. Hopefully I gave her a proper send-off.

(Update, 25/10 - She’s a liar and did come to HK again, so we’ve already worked together a third time since this was shot and posted. Expect another full write up!)

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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.

And then there were my camera and lens selections, both of which compounded the difficulties. Instead of my trusty modern mirrorless workhorses, I reached for a 12-year-old Canon SLR (the 5DSR) and a 20-year-old Canon 35mm film camera (the EOS 30V), neither of which I had all that much experience using. These were not, in hindsight, great choices for this situation. (I did actually have one of my M43 bodies along with me, with a new Sirui cinema lens, but I only used it for about the last 10 minutes of the shoot.)

Just to defend myself for a moment, the 5DSR is still pretty good in lower light situations, and I had a roll of Kodak Portra 800 loaded into the 30V, which I shot at 640 (overexposing slightly). I also had two fast lenses with me, the EF 24mm f/1.4L and TTArtisan 75mm f/1.5. You read that correctly – I shot this entire session with two focal lengths, three if you count the 20mm Sirui at the end. (If you need a visual cue to sort out which camera shot each photo: really grainy ones = film, widescreen = the OM-1 and Sirui, all others = the 5DSR with the 24 or 75mm.)

I’ll say it plainly: these were, like… not great ideas. There wasn’t enough light for stable hand-held shooting with Portra 800, nor were the temperatures of the lights appropriate for its color profile. What I got back from the lab was a roll of 36 generally dark, grainy, often out-of-focus frames. Even though I had the 75mm available (both camera bodies and lenses are EF-mount), I shot the entire roll of Portra with the 24mm, just as I did for Ana’s second shoot. There’s a full discussion of this lens choice in that post, if you find this a bizarre decision!

The 5DSR was a little bit more successful? Question mark? I was at ISO 800, shooting both lenses at or close to wide open, and still had issues with camera shake from the shutter speeds. Most of this is user error – I’m so used to shooting with modern mirrorless cameras that I’ve forgotten how these paleolithic SLRs work (or don’t work, as it were). There’s no image stabilization to be found in either camera or lens, and their comparatively rudimentary autofocus systems aren’t easy to use in lower light, even with extremely bright lenses. To make things even worse, the TTArtisans lens (which renders beautiful images when used properly) is manual focus, and SLRs have minimal in-camera gadgetry to assist in focusing. The predictable result? A bunch of very high resolution, very useless blurry images.

I could go on; suffice it to say that this experience did not make me nostalgic for the days of SLR photography. I think I’ll do a longer writeup about this experience for the prose part of the site, so keep your eyes peeled for that surely provocative analysis. Anyway, Niana was a good sport, and I did end up with some images that I think are not terrible, given the way I handcuffed myself on this one.

Upon reflection, I think I tried to get a little too cute with this shoot. I’m reminded of the immortal line from Spinal Tap - “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” I’ll leave it to you the audience to decide for yourselves whether I flew too close to the sun on this one. I think I have, at least, learned some valuable lessons for future such experiments… but we’ll see.

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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.

So that gave me 36+36-2=70 frames to work with in my session with Ana. For reference, if I had done this session with my digital gear, I’d probably have shot somewhere between 300 and 500 frames. This is another good reason to shoot film – you really need to slow down and think about each shutter press, because this stuff ain’t cheap. Each squeeze of the trigger during this session cost me around $0.50.

The shoot wasn’t all that different in practice apart from a much smaller number of shutter clicks. Ana was as buoyant and affable this time as before, maybe even a bit moreso since she was happy to see me again. We shot the 400 roll in a typical way, curtains open for maximum light and her instincts guiding the posing. I’ll reiterate here that the 24mm focal length is decidedly not the best for this kind of shoot, but this is just a quirk of mine – I love the wide field of view and absolutely need the fast aperture indoors with only available light. Hopefully it makes the shots distinctive? Unique? Provocative? Grotesque? I dunno, let me know what you think in the comments if you have strong opinions.

The 800 roll was a much less successful experiment. My plan was to shut the heavy curtains and guide a narrow beam of harsh light streaming into the room. You can probably picture the result I was going for – very dark shadows with a band of bright, warm daylight cutting across the model in dramatic fashion. In reality, the room was never dark enough, nor was the light from outside harsh enough to create this effect convincingly, so I had to abandon that idea in favor of a watered-down version. The 800 shots are definitely more contrasty, dramatic, and gritty, so I wouldn’t call it a total failure, but it’s definitely not what I was going for. It was also a great reminder that Portra 800 becomes a frightening, grainy mess if it’s underexposed, which some of these frames absolutely are. (See above on the importance of exposing your film properly.)

In the end, I’m glad that I chose to challenge myself with two film canisters, one camera, and one focal length. It helped that I was working with a model who I knew would have fun with the concept, so another big thanks to Ana for being such a good sport. I’m a teeny bit more confident about shooting film now, which is about the best one can hope for each time.

What say you, Naked Prose readers? Do you like the occasional film photo sessions? Can you even tell the difference? Should I keep rotating film into these shoots? Let me know what you think, and as always, thanks for reading.

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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 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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One thing that I’m acutely conscious of as I create this crazy Naked Prose project is the importance of establishing a coherent, consistent artistic style. I’m sure a social media manager would tell me that I need to be cultivating a brand, but that’s a bit more corporate than I’m willing to countenance at the moment. I need a vision, a calling card, a hallmark, a voice.

I’m sure that my photos, like any serious photographer’s, will have a look. I have my own particular way of selecting and framing my shots and, I like to think, a consistent post processing workflow that should result in some durable cohesion from shoot to shoot. I make conscious decisions that contribute to this, like only shooting with available (i.e. natural) light, not using reflectors (if only because I don’t have an assistant), and primarily shooting artistic nude poses from start to finish.

These decisions, however, put artificial limitations on what I can do creatively within the small time and space of a model shoot. They’re also things that I can change at any moment, since I’m the one who has set up these constraints in the first place.

Today’s shoot with model Niña (from the Philippines, number two if you’re scoring at home) has got me ruminating on all of this more than usual. Really it was just another model shoot in a tiny Hong Kong hotel room – I’ve done half a dozen of these already – but I am wary of falling into predictable patterns and, ultimately, getting stuck in a creative rut. I mean, there’s only so much I can do with natural light and 250 square feet of space.

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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I guess I’m just shooting Ukrainian models now. 🤷‍♂️ Meet Nastya (IG: @aargus), model number three from the great Eastern European nation. (I’ve long considered this part of the world to have the most beautiful women, so I’m not complaining even slightly about this.) Traveling and modeling on her own, Nastya happened to pass through Hong Kong as a part of her southeast Asian tour, so I grabbed the yellow studio room for us and we got to work for a couple hours.

This was my first time in the yellow room, although I’ve had my eye on it for a while. The colors and décor are well chosen, and the spacious layout offered even more shooting opportunities than we could cover in just a couple hours. Nastya loved it immediately; I could see the creative ideas swimming around her head as she surveyed the space.

I inspected the light in various corners of the place while she did her hair and makeup. Like the black room that I shot Amelia in, this one is generously illuminated by a window spanning most of the length of one wall and softened with a movable sheer curtain. It was a sunny and cloudless day; dappled light streamed in even through the sheer material. The bright conditions were great news for my cameras’ sensors, though – I shot this entire session with my usual two OM-System bodies and the twin zooms with Glimmerglass (especially appropriate for the room’s golden tones); base ISO (200) was more than sufficient.

Nastya joined me at the L-shaped couch and launched into a full presentation of her arsenal of lingerie and saucy accoutrements. I’ve had enough experience with models now to realize that my usual style of only shooting nude sessions start to finish is apparently atypical; the expectation always seems to be starting with some coverings and working buffward. This makes a certain kind of sense, but from my perspective as a photographer, shooting in the opposite order (nude to clothed) saves me from having to clone out the lines and indentations that tight-fitting garments leave on the model’s skin.

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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I wondered how many models I’d be able to work with before I had a second one from the same country, and this shoot with Merylin ends the streak at five. She’s also Ukrainian, just like Anna, the model from my second professional shoot; in fact the two of them are friends and work for the same modeling agency. Like Anna, Merylin left Ukraine many years ago and now lives abroad, splitting her time between Bali and Barcelona (she’s a surfer).

Even though she didn’t add a new country of origin to my list of collaborators, she still brought plenty of new things to the shooting experience. She’s the first so far to ask me, very directly, what I expect from her during the shoot. (You might think this is always an explicit conversation at the outset, but so far that has not been my experience.) Anyway, it was a great opportunity for the two of us to get a better idea of what needed to happen over the next two hours, so I’m glad she asked. She was already wearing the large hoop earrings when I arrived but was willing to take them off if I wanted. I thought about it for a good five or ten seconds. (You can see my decision in the shots. Right call?)

Another aspect of this shoot that was new and different was the amount of input and feedback that Merylin wanted from me. This is an aspect of my craft that is decidedly underdeveloped right now; I openly admit that directing models isn’t a strength of mine. I’m like the George Lucas of nude photography. I was shooting with two cameras and lenses, as usual (the twins), and after a couple rounds of shooting she wanted to see what I’d captured so far. Perhaps it’s my relative inexperience with this kind of shooting, or my introversion, or my perfectionism, but my first feeling at this request was terror.

You can imagine my internal monologue. Oh god, she’s going see these photos and be like, “what the hell is this guy doing?” It only lasted a few seconds before my calm, rational brain reminded itself that I actually do know what I’m doing with a camera, and she wants to see the photos to assist her posing, not my composition. I put them both on image review mode and let her flick through everything I’d shot so far, which she did with alacrity, studying herself closely across the frames. She saw some things she could improve in her posing, and we got back to 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 Ana, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.

Head on over to Patreon!

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