My first artistic nude (paid) photo shoot.

The real journey starts here - my first photo set and writeup with a hired art nude model.

I had put it off for long enough. Made plenty of excuses not to do it – I’m not good enough yet, I’ll be too shy, it’ll be a bad experience, I don’t have the time to focus on it… Eventually I ran out of excuses, and the day came. My first commercial nude model shoot. Equal parts anxious and excited, I struggled to sleep the night before. (It also turns out I was coming down with a pretty hefty cold. I guess that didn’t help.)

There’s a much longer story about how I got here, but I’ll unpack all of that another day in the Prose section. I met up with this local Hong Kong model, Angie, at the closest MTR stop to our shooting location, and we walked a few minutes together. We chatted a little bit – I’ve heard it’s important to build a rapport between model and photographer – but we didn’t entirely share a common language. Her English is functional, not fluent, and my Cantonese is as non-existent as all the other palefaces’ in this town.

We walked on, chatting anyway, trying to learn a bit about each other before we got to the venue. Much like Hong Kong itself, Angie has struggled to get back to normal after the pandemic, which effectively made any sort of creative collaborative work impossible for the better part of three years.

Perhaps ten minutes pass before we make it to the venue, which neither of us had ever visited before. I prodded an AI chatbot to spit out a few recommendations for private indoor photography facilities in the city, and this particular event space, which has several rooms themed with different colors, looked promising. I chose the white room for this shoot, mostly because it seemed like the brightest one. I figured the fewer things I needed to worry about during this shoot the better, and a surfeit of natural light precluded any would-be ISO and shutter speed anxieties.

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