Dude!

Justin — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

When I decided to get back into por­trait shoot­ing, I approached it the way I think many other folks approach it — look for attrac­tive & young women in lit­tle attire. Let’s face it, those pho­tos get far more atten­tion than any oth­ers that I post and, well, I like look­ing at attrac­tive & young women in lit­tle attire. Seemed like a win-​win scenario.

Recently, I made the mis­take of pay­ing atten­tion to other pho­tog­ra­phers and heard things which caused me to recon­sider my sub­jects a bit. The first was an inter­view with Scott Kelby. He men­tioned hav­ing a port­fo­lio review with some­one he respected and shared the feed­back dur­ing the inter­view. I may get the quote slightly off, but the gist of it was like so:

I see that you’re good at tak­ing beau­ti­ful pic­tures of beau­ti­ful peo­ple. Can you take a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of an inter­est­ing person?

I’m glad he brought up that feed­back, because it res­onated with me a bit. In fact, it’s changed the way I look for sub­jects. Now I’ll grant you that Justin in the photo above is still a hand­some young man, but he’s not a woman and he’s not scant­ily clad. For me, this is progress.

The next pho­tog­ra­pher who rein­forced this idea is Zack Arias. I watched an inter­view he did on TWiT Photo and he shared a project he’s doing with older folks — min­i­mum age was 70, I think. He’s get­ting envi­ron­men­tal shots, or reac­tions that show their inner child. I watched the show while his images scrolled by and thought “this is pretty cool.”

To be fair, there was another influ­ence lately that I have in mind and it’s due to my recent inter­est in com­posit­ing. I have almost zero inter­est in sports, but that doesn’t mean I’m not impressed by ath­letes. That’s still young peo­ple who look great, but the con­text is dif­fer­ent. I’m inter­ested because what they do is inter­est­ing. It doesn’t hurt that they look good doing it.

None of this means that I’m giv­ing up on scant­ily clad young women, but I see room for expan­sion. If every other por­trait pho­tog­ra­pher is out shoot­ing the same young women, kids or senior por­traits, then I need to look else­where now and then. Good thing Bike­to­ber­fest is com­ing up!