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It’s an honor to once again be included in a Shoot the Centerfold photography seminar. Bring your questions, your challenges, your enthusiasm for photography with you. I’ll bring my over forty years of experience in photography and do the best I can to help you become a better and more successful photographer.

However, be forewarned. I shoot straight from the hip so expect complete candor when it comes to judging your work and your potential. The same warning holds true, and perhaps even more so, for models and prospective models.

If you aren’t already aware, it is a tough business in which to succeed and an honest evaluation is required at every step of the way. Not everyone will succeed but for those that do, the rewards are significant.

It is very difficult and dangerous to attempt to articulate what one is looking for in editorial photography. Situations can be described in minute detail all the way down to the tilt of a head, how the light should fall, what the subject should not only be doing, but also thinking as well, and the image can still be an absolute disappointment. Conversely, a photographer might describe a situation that would seem to have little or no chance of working and the color, composition, emotion evoked by the image might not only make it publishable but also memorable.

From a photography editor or art director’s point of view, trying to describe what is desired in an image is an eternally frustrating exercise. Anticipation is often followed by disappointment. When images yet to be taken are over-visualized, the result will almost certainly fail to meet expectations.

Why have I found this to be true in over forty years of working with photographers, whether working with a relative beginner at the craft or the most highly paid and experienced professionals in the business? First of all, and this requires some very real humility on my part, I probably don’t really know exactly what I want. It’s like asking a reader what he wants in a book or magazine before he picks it up, what a movie audience member would like to see happen in a film. It shouldn’t be the function of the end user – the viewer of an image – to imagine exactly what that image should be. And that’s because only the creator of the image, the photographer, has control over what is taking place in front of the camera, what is being seen through his lens.

For that reason, the photographer must be a combination of cajoler and dictator when he is on the set. Models must be made to feel comfortable, at ease, relaxed. Production assistants, make-up artists, stylists, anyone on the set or location involved in the image-taking process has to feel free to contribute, free to offer insights and observations. At the same time, everyone on the set, especially the model, must know who is in charge, who is directing the action, the pose, the situation. Depending on the personalities involved, it can sometimes mean sharp words, strong directions.

For example, Pompeo Posar was one of Playboy’s most prolific and gifted Playmate and girl photographers. He was from Trieste – a charming, mustachioed man who loved women, charmed women and followed the old European tradition of treating his editors extremely differentially. On one shooting, he asked me if I would be willing to appear as a model in a picture story situation, a faux going-away party for a Playmate about to leave on a European holiday. There were a half-dozen of us in the situation plus the Playmate and we were all quickly caught up in the concept. Let’s have a little party for our Playmate… And things got just a little bit out of Pompeo’s control until he barked at us in no uncertain terms that this was a shooting, that we only need appear to be having fun and that we had to take his direction, not follow our own instincts. For a moment, I thought, “Wow. What a crab.” And then I realized he was feeling the pressure to produce the right result, a pressure which the rest of us were unaware.

It was a good lesson because at the end of the day, at the end of each shooting, it is the photographer who bears the responsibility for the results of the shooting, his name that is credited, his reputation at stake. No editor is interested in getting an excuse instead of a publishable image. By the way, I have heard several hundred varieties of excuses in my day. And I know many of them are valid. However, as I always tell the photographer, we can’t publish your excuse instead of your image.

In terms of what I like to see from a prospective photographer: I’d rather see twenty-five images from one shooting than one image from twenty-five shootings. Let‘s face it. Everyone gets lucky once in awhile. I often receive a sample photo – one photo – from a photographer or rep. It can be beautiful. It can be magnificent. However, it tells me very little, if anything, about whether the photographer is someone with whom we might actually want to work. I want to see enough images from a situation so that I can begin to sense what the photographer was striving for, so that I can see there are several well-composed, well-lit images in the shoot. Editing a complete shooting is often like reading a story.

One can sense that the perhaps a new model is initially uncomfortable. In a good shooting, one sees the process brought along slowly, sees the modeling relaxing, becoming physically comfortable, seeing some authentic smiles and perhaps even a laugh. And then one can see the photographer searching for the best angles on the face and body, the pose that accentuates the strengths of the model, even the attempt at a pose or situation that isn’t working and is quickly dropped.

One photographer at a recent seminar showed us a shooting of a very pretty girl on a rooftop. Not a lot of concept to the shooting, but the styling was very contemporary, the light was good and the photographer showed us a variety of compositions, of visual ideas. I came away from looking at that shooting with a positive impression of what this fellow was attempting to accomplish. It made me want to see more of his work, see him shooting different women in a variety of situations. And I would undoubtedly have learned more about him if he had three shootings to show, twenty to forty images each. It’s easy enough to look at fifty or even one-hundred images.

Also, and most important, if you want to be judged as a photographer do very little, if any, post production work on the images you submit. If you are looking for a job as a digital retoucher, then Photoshop away. However, I can’t judge the effectiveness of a photographer if I am looking at overly retouched, unrealistic images. I have nothing against Photoshop and I have seen shootings saved by Photoshop. However, when judging a new photographer, you don’t want to look at how he saved a shooting with retouching.

Attitude. If you have one when submitting images, do your best to lose it. Editors get a multitude of submissions. Ones that come with identifiably difficult attitudes attached to them are quickly discarded. I want to work with people who have a true understanding of what the magazine needs and the talent to produce to that need. I want to work with photographers who have an understanding that magazines (and ad agencies) are bureaucracies; that there is almost always more than one person involved in the decision-making process; that those people don’t necessarily always agree; that budget issues are often at play; that submitted work can be terrific and be well received and that there still may be no place to put it; that pages are indeed precious; that near-misses are still misses since this isn’t horseshoes. Patience is necessary. Intelligent perseverance is OK; being a pest is not.

Finally, the litmus test for any artist, any craftsman, writer, painter, photographer is the work itself. It all starts and ends there. And in the end, it is the work that does the talking, not the person who creates it. If the work is good enough, everything else will ultimately fall into place. Not to compare ourselves in any way to the greats, but Hemingway rewrote “The Old Man and the Sea” over forty times. There is a room hidden under the Duomo in Florence not open to the public due to the fragility of the sketches that cover its walls – sketches by Michelangelo. They are some of his work sketches, drawings of ideas he discarded – in effect, the room is Michelangelo’s trash basket. If geniuses need to discard their mistakes, need to recognize and throw away what doesn’t work for them, what about the rest of us? Be critical of your work, not to the point of paralysis, but to the point of finding your version of perfection.

For more advice and possibilities, come see me at the next Shoot The Centerfold seminar Saturday, Oct. 19 in Los Angeles.

Register here!

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