We’ve made it a little lighter and brighter, winters approaching and we really didn’t want to assist anyone’s seasonal disorders, we’ve added an ‘offers page’ for current special offers, we ditched the ‘news’ page because you can follow the exciting developments of the small mole on my left ankle right here! Nice. Also gone is the ‘testimonials page’, we thought it was rubbish because our clients couldn’t spell, er……..actually ignore that bit! We moved the client testimonials to the NEW gallery page, so you can see the beautiful clients with their beautiful words all in one place! Some new clients were also added, long overdue on some, sorry!

Also new, and I’m in no way responsible for any part of it (based on the fact i said i would NEVER do it) is the ‘retouching’ page. This was insisted on; at gunpoint; from our client Victoria, who says she is ‘sick to the back teeth of people saying “well i could never look like that”’ whenever she mentions her ‘cure’ for mild depression. More on this coming soon!
Social stuff…… the blog (well the last 3 posts) makes it to the front-page, yes i thought that was rather clever too, and Twitter has its own little feed box at the bottom of the site, Mrs. Naked is looking after the tweets so anything could happen, you could follow her and get all the juicy stuff direct!

(Twitter WARNING…… i have created a monster of Mrs. Naked over the years and she noticed quite a few years ago that Formula one is not as boring as she thought, it would seem that some of the drivers (O.K. Mostly Jenson) are rather nice to look at, and before you think we’re recent converts we have been following the Somerset lad since he started in F1 and the Honda team since he joined them, although it’s now Brawn, same difference to us! So please be aware that weekend tweets during the season may seem a little ‘random’!)

There’s some other boring ‘backend’ stuff that’s new too but after spending several weeks on it I’m bored of it myself so i couldn’t imagine just how dull it would be for me to tell you about it, let’s just say it works and leave it at that

Upon opening the afore mentioned site i hit ‘view source’ (sorry old web designer habits die hard, i like to appreciate the formatting of code (booooooring), although this guy’s was a mess) after a little while i find a link to the Naked Tog home page, interesting i thought……. switching back to ‘human’ view i discovered best part of my ‘about’ page, with a few adjustments here and there to fit the site it was residing upon, i hasten to add this is where the spelling, grammar and typo problems seemed to reside also.

It was the most perfect example of DONT ‘cut ’n’ paste’ unless you know what you are doing, unfortunately it seems i do and he doesn’t , he’d left the text link anchor where ‘The Naked Photographer’ should be and had simply written his own name as the anchor text (Like THIS), thus completely missing the fact that he has a link to The Naked Tog on his ‘Boudoir’ page, shame really.

I’m not going to lower myself to giving the guy a link, but hey, you know who you are and thanks for the link to The Naked Photographer, the invoice for copyrighting services is in the post.

In many industries; although it seems particularly rife in the photographic one; training courses seem to be everyone’s new business plan, the average ‘course’ costs up to £600 per person; oh but places are limited! Up to 15 perhaps? Some are even generous enough to offer a sandwich or two!

I won’t patronise your obvious intelligence (based on the fact you are here!) so I’ll let you do the maths on that. There are of course a few nominal expenses to pay out, for models etc. Couple of hundred should cover the days expenses.

Until recently this ‘phenomenon’ seemed to be limited to wedding photography, and to a degree I find that at least partially acceptable, after all it’s better for a new wedding photographer to have a small idea about what they should be doing rather than ruin someone’s ‘special day’ completely, I still have some reservations about it but I’ll get to that….

On a recent Google I found all the usual suspects and not surprisingly a few dozen more ‘newbie’s’ and then I started noticing that some of the new pretenders had the Gaul to be offering ‘training’. At first I found this hysterical, then I became rather distressed, firstly I’ve never heard of these people and secondly the work on display was less than accomplished boudoir. Delving deeper into this just makes me wonder what exactly is on offer, similar to the wedding training situation, models are used as the subject; which admittedly is about the only way this could be done; but in REAL life these two parts of the photographic industry are dealing with ordinary people, not models. Models know; or at least should know; how to stand, how to look, how to smile………. you get the picture, they also get paid to do the job so you don’t even have to be nice to them!

Clients are not models ;they are everyday people; and especially in boudoir they are in an unusual situation, there is no training that can help with this, you need to be a people person, and with that you either are or you are not. You could be the greatest lighting guru in the world and have a team of retouchers in a darkened room, but if you cannot deal with a real live client then the rest of it is wasted.

The short of it is that we cannot teach something that cannot be taught, and what everyone else is offering should not be taught.

Of course your expecting me to give a blunt ‘no’ to that question, but i think we should look at it a little differently. The first hurdle and often the most difficult is of course the decision to say ‘i am going to do this’ and to that my answer would of course be the afore mentioned ‘no’, from there on in, any inhibitions you have will guide you to achieve the result you want, without going too far. I often have to remind people that ‘The Naked Photographer’ is a creative and not a literal statement, I’m certainly not naked and i never expect my clients to be either, if they choose to be, then they want to be for their own reasons.

Whilst i would never purport to be the Photoshop’per of the century, and would go as far to say i probably use about 4% of the program features (it is widely reported that even the Adobe staff who build it have limited knowledge of the whole program) i do know my field.

Photographers use Photoshop in a number of ways, in my opinion it should be used to process an image, much like traditional film, and in some situations make small alterations to any imperfections (after all we are none of us perfect), there are of course situations where a larger amount of adjustments may be required, but just how far do you go?

A photographer will get an image right; or as right as possible; ‘in camera’ with lighting, angles and positioning; dull but true; this in turn makes the post processing a much simpler task, after all you can work on an image for hours, but if you put junk in you WILL get junk out.

You’re probably expecting me to show how wonderful / god awful i am with a ‘before and after’ type photo, but no, absolutely, never, I just won’t. Why? Because my clients come to me for beautiful images of themselves, they don’t want me to make them look hideous just to prove a point that i can operate a graphics tablet for my personal gratification, or for that matter a camera.

So next time you see a ‘i am a Photoshop guru’ – ‘look at what i did to xyz person’, just think to yourself, do i really need to know, or do i just want the best image of me?

When photographing women for boudoir many will want the final result to be presented to a man; and as all women will know, we men come from a slightly different planet, so inevitably we see things differently, it’s like speaking the same lingo, what’s the point in speaking Latin when your audience barely speaks English?

Both boudoir and burlesque are not really anything to do with photography as individual words, but the words inevitably conjure up images to the mind, so why shouldn’t they conjure up images in print.

So what’s the difference? dress code, boudoir can now be interpreted as just about anything that implies or gets near to nudity; or in some cases actually nude; burlesque is more about the flamboyant lingerie often associated with the burlesque act, corsets, suspenders, stockings, feathers and fans. Whilst the boudoir style seems to have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century with modern props and accessories, burlesque is firmly cemented in history and tradition, the choice of styles as far as photography goes are fully interchangeable.

Well thats going to depend on a number of factors, with the rise in popularity in ‘boudoir photography’ many togs are venturing into the field, with reasons mostly coming down to ‘a wedding client asked me to do….’ and thats fair enough, although is the client getting what they set out for ? probably, although do they even know what that is ? maybe not. Your average wedding and portrait tog has generally invested heavily in a very dull shade of Dulux over recent years, keeping up with the ‘lifestyle’ marketeers at our favorite high street studio; £25 voucher anyone?

So just how many boudoirs have the minimalist whitewashed look ? not very many, so why do some ‘boudoir photographers’ insist on using the ‘daytime decor’ for the boudoir shoots, beats me, tell you what, lets just go to venture and secretly whip off most of our clothes in the changing room, that should do nicely.