I have a confession to make
Recently I ran a local model call for plus-sized curvy ladies. Five beautiful souls took a brave and bold step for themselves. They agreed to model for me for a reduced session fee in exchange for images that I can use for my gallery and adverts etc. This is a standard practice among photographers of all genres to help build a portfolio and hone skills.
Look left, this is one of those amazing ladies.
I chose to run the model call for several reasons, all well intended. I’ll list them here before I make my confession.
I want a gallery representative of all women so any woman can look at my gallery and think “she looks like me”
I wanted to make my studio more visible in the local community.
I wanted to learn the techniques needed to photograph larger-bodied people.
The model call was very successful, I got what I wanted, the ladies had a wonderful time and we all got some beautiful images. We all had fun! That’s very important to me, that my clients have a wonderfully positive experience. (I have five glowing testimonials!) All of the ladies are now on this website, they gladly agreed to be inspirations to ladies that may look like them. Points one and two haven’t changed, it’s point three where my confession lies.
I created the modeling call with two key assumptions.
Larger-bodied people will have more insecurities.
I need to photograph them differently because of their shape and size and (see above) insecurities.
So here’s my confession and huge learning moment. I was wrong! 100% totally and unequivocally wrong. All five ladies breezed into my studio with the same level of nerves and confidence and insecurities that everyone else had. I put them in no different poses or positions nor did I use any different lighting techniques nor camera settings or direction language (arch your back, pop your booty, straighten your toes, eyes closed, chest up and out). Everything was, and is, the same. I asked them the same question and got the same answers.
My learning is that there is nothing to learn nor anything different to do. All my clients are uniquely perfectly imperfect beautiful human beings.
Consider me educated and humbled.