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MINIMALISM & GEOMETRY

Photography is ambiguous. It can mean everything or it can mean nothing; and most of the time anything goes. The key difference in any of these aspects is the composition of your images’ main elements. Hair, make-up, wardrobe, and styling are the components of a successful photograph (assuming that you are photographing models). Even when photographing nudes, the actual styling can be created by increasing or decreasing light to add contour and shadowing.

I strongly recommend you see beyond your beautiful subject and find beauty in the primary elements as seem in this single scene lighting book. If you do find it successfully, add your model to an already beautiful working production that supports the main subject – the model herself. As seen in my sample images, the model is wearing thigh-high boots, a small, vinyl lingerie outfit, and a wig to set a certain fetish-like style without additional overkill. We often tend to overproduce our images, forgetting that “less is more.”

As diverse opinions from all types of photography collide, finding what should be the right formula to get your images sold and/or published becomes essential. We always come to the same conclusion in the end: it’s not that difficult to get your images published as long as you know on which door to knock.

There are plenty of gimmicks, advice, and offerings in today’s industry. However, just put yourself into an editor’s shoes and consider what the publication’s audience would want to see. Don’t only analyze your personal images but instead analyze the images that are already in the industry’s major ad campaigns. Compare them to your work and ask yourself why your competitors’ images are in there and yours… are not.

The answer is quite simple from an editor’s point of view, which I have heard several times during my photography career. “Why should I publish these images? We already have all options covered and your images are not cutting-edge enough!” All this means is that there is somebody out there already doing the same job, just with a better presentation of their photography compared to yours.

So, this single scene book will take you back to basics, and think what is it that will make your images different from the others who are already getting published, and not all those million-plus other photographers who are in the same shoes as you. You and your images need to stand out from the masses when they are seen at the editor’s desk. The same goes for each photography category out there.

Here’s a good one… “Don’t fall in love with your images.”

Your images are just a product. Photography is all about angles and light as if it were visual architecture. When you think about it and see photography for what it is, it’s very similar to architecture and design. No, we’re not going to start calling ourselves lighting engineers or camera architects, but if you begin to think about the lines and the harmonic symmetry in photography you will quickly realize the similarities between these two very visual art forms.

My passion is to shoot people in tasteful settings. When you come to a self-understanding about beauty, it can be found as much in a building as in a woman. Then, you come to the realization that this is not only about sex-appeal as much as it is about lighting, photography, composition, symmetry, and other visual calculations.

We seem to search for constant validation in everything we do. When we finally do achieve some success, however, we should always remember that we are only as good as our last photoshoot as far as the industry’s editors and clients are concerned. Just look at today’s singers and how they can easily fall from the pinnacle of success to the lowest crack in the earth unless they have a hot new song out on the charts. The same happens to photographers who are quickly forgotten unless they are able to constantly capture timeless images that continue to be impressive. I hope that this new single scene book will shed some light to your already existing knowledge base.

Jarmo Pohjaniemi

Description for “Fetish Dream”

This book is available for download with iBooks on your Mac or iPad, and with iTunes on your computer. Multi-touch books can be read with iBooks on your Mac or iPad. Books with interactive features may work best on an iPad.