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.

Well OK, actually I’m not, and I’m going to tell you why, and what the ‘others’ don’t want you to know.

‘Professional’ bodies, as they like to call themselves are mostly (I’m putting the ‘mostly’ in because some are worthy) excuses for photographers to make themselves seem credible or professional, but heres the thing, you may have been wowed by a naff looking ‘professional organisation’ logo or claim, and thought oo they must be good he/she’s in the XYZ club for ‘professionals’, cobblers.

Would YOU like to be in the same club?, don’t think your snap shots are up to it? Well none of that matters, because (fan fare….) for today only (OK, every day) they have a special offer…….. You can join! for just £xxx (prices vary) and then you too can be a ‘pro’!

Not sounding as good now is it, although you can ‘upgrade’ your membership to : Fellow/Licentiate/Associate/Master/Fellowship/Head Idiot (OK i made that last one up, but the list is getting endless) Just submit a few prints from your holiday in Corfu and if they like them and you pay the £xxx fee (seeing a pattern here) you can have the ‘qualification’ and another letter to go on your ‘professional name’.

You will have noticed that i have not ‘named names’ and also used ‘mostly’ as a reference, the guilty know who they are and it’s not difficult to spot them, others are worthwhile in some instances but it always comes down to the customers choice, don’t think membership, think person, do you like/can you work with the photographer and are the pictures to your liking? if not, move on.

Like most parents we look forward to the 15 times yearly school photo coming home, Mrs. Naked Tog always feels compelled to part with an unnecessarily large sum of cash in a bid to buy the ‘top package’ of each of our children, and a group shot to boot, some get sent to grandparents whilst the others linger in the kitchen draw for six months until they get moved into the loft for storage. Whilst that may seem to be just a blatant waste of cash there is a plus, that plus is ‘discount’, theres a healthy brood at our house so when you have a ‘discount for multiple children/sets’ carrot dangled in front of you you usually bite.

So to the point, the school in their ultimate wisdom took it upon themselves to change from a perfectly reasonable; most of the pictures were good enough to buy; photographer who offered that all important ‘carrot’ to one that not only offers no discount but seems to have all the photographic skill of a wet mop, lets hope the schools getting a better commission rate, because someone needs to benefit from this disaster, and i really can’t see it being the parents.

So whats wrong with the pictures then? well lets start at the top with Mollie, i have to admit that Mollies picture is, apart from being poorly framed, OK although in saying that i feel the need to point out that it it absolutely impossible to take a bad picture of Mollie, so they had a foregone conclusion on that one.

Next we come to Thomas, now whilst Thomas can be a bit; OK a lot; of a so and so he can sometimes raise a smile and his previous school photo’s have been good, his picture is a disaster, it looks like he’s 40 foot from the camera; or maybe he shrank at school that day (those in the know will realise that’s probably a ‘thomasism’), and he was sat at just the right angle to make his ears look like a ‘flappy paddle gearbox’, nice.

Eleanor’s next, not usually a problem in front of a camera; and not bad behind it either; Eleanor’s hair is naturally curly but goes to school with her hair tied up, so why i wonder, when the nit nurse has been banned in schools, has someone untied her hair and brushed it straight then told her to fall asleep while someone took her photo.

And lastly we come to Toby, it’s Toby’s fist year at the school so it’s his first ‘school photo’, now Toby much like the others, is far from camera shy and will happily sit and smirk at a camera, but again it seems the school photographer has struck again, he looks less than impressed so much so that he’s not even looking at the camera.

So all in all a quite remarkable disaster meaning to satisfy the grandparents and the kitchen draw I’m going to have to re take them all.