This is a somewhat unusual post, in that it is not about a photographic session that was run, but rather the reaction that occurred when the images were posted on Facebook. So in someways it is a little bit of a rant.

In my last post I shared the story of the shoot with Heaven and particularly the background as to how I came about shooting her. The session went really well, and she was very happy with how it had gone. Once she saw the images she absolutely loved them.

As is my normal practice she chose the top ones that were shared online.

It was then that one female member of the Facebook group complained that the images were creepy and went onto suggest that they were typical of situations where a male photographer had enticed a female model to pose in next to nothing.

Other female posters did not see anything creepy in the images so her opinion was not wide spread.

Now with criticism like this sometime it is better to ignore it. However in this case I decided not to do that, as the poster was making some very wide assumptions that were frankly incorrect. Heaven was not enticed into the shoot, in fact she wanted to do it. She had also had full control over the poses (which had been discussed in advance) and she had chosen the selected images.

The only thing that the poster had correct was that I was a male photographer.

It is the sad fact that there are male photographers who do shoot nude/lingerie images simply as a way of seeing naked women. However not all of male photographers are like this, but to judge our work on that standard is just not right.

I believe that I got through to the poster, however rather than apologise for her mistake, she simply deleted the whole post.

My shoot with Heaven (that’s her real name) started with a post in a Facebook model group where models were being warned about a photographer who was advertising to pay for shoots but was then turning out really creepy and inappropriate.

Heaven is a 27 year old mother of three who had wanted some lingerie/nude shots taken of her and has been involved with the other photographer. Needless to say that she had not had a very good session and the photos quite frankly were crap.

I therefore offered to do a session for her. We met in a foodcourt and went over what she was looking for and the shoot was planned.

I generally like to ease new nude models into the shoot and the easiest way to do this is to start with sheer pieces of fabric. As it turned out Heaven was very confident with her body and we were able to move to nudes fairly quickly.

We then wanted to try a couple of different approaches so I set up a rod at a 90 degree angle to the backdrop, and from it suspended a venetian blind. I then positioned a bare bulb strobe on the other side of it which created nice hard shadows.

We then moved the rod around to in front of the backdrop and hung lace over it to create a window. To create a completely different look I used my lensbaby as this creates a very unique look.

For the final series of nude image we had discussed recreating the famous flower scene out of the movie “American Beauty”. This involved Heaven lying on a fur rug placed on the floor. Fake petals were then used to conceal.

For this shot the camera was placed on a boom arm above Heaven and fired using the Image App. This is a great setup for these types of vertical shots.

As it turned out I did not have enough petals and more were added in post.

While it may seen the wrong way round, Heaven then put on the lingerie that she had brought. We did it in that order to avoid the underwear causing lines on the body.

For the lingerie shots I decided to do something quite different. I had noticed that the light in the room was positioned like a Rembrandt style. So I put my 50mm f1.2 lens on and shot using natural light. I was really pleased with the results and so was Heaven.

When her favourites were posted online I did get a very interesting reaction, but that I will outline that in the next post.