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If you haven’t already noticed, I love photography. So much so, that I feel like I’m constantly learning and striving to grow. One of the things that I like to do is to study the works of past and current artists to see how I can further develop my style by understanding what I like.
The most immediate, and blatant resource that I have on hand, as a millennial (a term I begrudgingly am identified as) is through Instagram. I follow a bunch of family and friends, but I also try to keep up with my contemporaries and see the work they’re putting out. Though their work is great and compels me to work harder, there is one factor that I’ve noticed as a common denominator: everyone tends to work with a majority of female models.
To back up a little bit, I believe the way to know a photographer’s personality is through the way they compose an image. The information you see in one photograph tells you what they want you to see, and, more crucially, how they want you to see that subject. The “how” is the most important part because that speaks to the values and experiences of the individual behind the camera, and what they have to say about a particular matter. For travel photography and photojournalism, this is definitely the case, but if you carefully study portrait photography, this is certainly the case.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but there seems to be enough portraits out there, where this seems to be the case. For me, however, I really want to branch in different types of work that I can diversify myself by approaching this genre of model photography in my own way. Much like with my session with Nancy, I wanted to do a fashion focused shoot that would utilize male models, as the tone and approach would be completely different and new for me.
Here’s a little experiment on Instagram you can try. If you look at many of the model hashtags that are in circulation, and let me know how many male model accounts are out there. That is, if you’re reading this in the future, where this has evened out, then that doesn’t count.
Finding not a lot of luck, I reached out to my best friends, Wes and Brian. This was way better than contacting someone I didn’t know at first, just so I can practice my directing style on the day of a shoot. With Wes and Brian, they more or less knew the look I’m going for, despite having zero experience doing this before, but I wanted to practice giving them actionable instructions and to see what they can come up with.
In the end, I really enjoyed how the images came out. I wanted to focus the editing, in post, to focus on the print-ad look that I can someday shop to different brands. The studio we rented had nice white backgrounds and hardwood floors, so it had a modern, yet minimalist look to it. The shots with them posed against the window had nice natural light coming through, giving a rich contrast through their shadows that gave a nice dramatic weight to them. Looking this good has to be moody, I guess.
A lot of it feels like what I’ve seen for ads for watches or even Levi’s, in one of the shots with Wes, in jeans, and his jacket slung over his shoulder. I wanted to echo that sort of inspiration, to have that devil may care sort of attitude in their expressions. I also wanted to play with shapes more, which has them angled in their seats, or the way their arm position is placed. I didn’t necessarily want to go with strong, dominantly masculine poses, but rather something that’s relaxed and more introspective while retaining a bit of that confidence in their expressions.
The whole experience was so fun, just because of my long years of friendship with the two of them, and that we’re able to riff off of each other’s ideas and for them being on board with the project in general. I love their enthusiasm and this is one of the shoots I’m most proud of just from the amount of effort we put into it.