[KW]

Just wanted to see what some other people's pet peeves are about professional photography.

I'm a professional photographer--I was a photojournalist for 15 years in NJ and now work freelance in Colorado.* I shoot corporate work, nature, portraits, news assignments for a local paper, etc.* I teach nature/wildlife photography.** You get the picture. (No pun intended.)

Now for my peeve: I also photograph artistic nudes and my work is truly artistic nudes, not glamour/pinup/boudoir/sexy.* I'm certainly not approaching it in that way.

Well, unfortunately, there is a proliferation of photographers who claim to shoot artistic nudes and their work is all pouty lips, soft porn, alluring naked women photographs.* Call it what it is.* They're all staring at the camera and looking seductive.*

Many other photographers I see online have galleries where's it's obvious they have no concept of lighting or posing.* The naked woman is enough!* "Look, she's taking off her top."

I'm thinking of sites like Domai.com (which I think stand for dirty old men something something), hegre-archives.com, BlueNudes.com and SimpleNudes.com.* They're the first sites you see when you Google "Artistic Nudes".

They make it hard to position yourself when everyone expects you're doing the same thing.* When clients find me, they often say how refreshing it was to finally find something other than that.

Here's what a client of mine said once that sums it up:
"I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly, but at 41 years old, the ol’ college girl model wanna-be was not it. Then I hit on a link that advertised “artistic nude photography.” I passed the hyperlink several times in the list of photographers mentally mocking, “Yeah, call it what you want…” (having seen so many photographers with pictures of young women in provocative poses or giving the age-old “come hither” look). I wasn’t offended or disgusted, but I wasn’t looking to recreate any bedroom scenes. After three or four passovers, I finally decided to give the guy or gal a try and clicked. What I came upon was photography by Kenneth, which upon first glance I knew it was exactly what I had in mind even though I didn’t have anything really defined.* What I saw was art. It wasn’t boudoir, intimate, or anything remotely close to what the other sites offered."

Clients have traveled from Phoenix and Chicago for a session because they can't find someone in their city.* A city the size of Chicago, and you can't find one qualified photographer of art nudes?

So, my peeves are photographers shooting soft porn under the guise of artistic nudes.* I'm no prude--you can shoot all the sexy images you want, even hardcore, have fun, you'll probably make more money than the rest of us--but don't call it artistic nudes because that's what my potential clients are finding before they find me.* And sometimes, I'm betting, they quit looking before they ever find me.* (And before they find that photographer in their city.)

And my second peeve is photographers shooting glamour model portfolios in Podunk, Wyoming, promising women a lucrative modelling career.* When was the last time one of them got any paid work from this "portfolio"?* I think the photographers are just shooting what excites them, regardless of the career possibilities of the model.* They should rent a video instead and save the model some money.

Unless the model is located in a major metropolitan area, I doubt they'll get any work at all from the portfolio.* They might get some paid work if they had some images with clothes on, frankly.*

Stop promising them a career and wasting their money.

That's my piece.* What's yours?

Kenneth