Fact: Most women are beautiful.
Fact: Most women do not acknowledge this to themselves.
Result: A very common refrain among all my (amateur?) photographer friends that finding people/women to pose is difficult. That is unless you are a very handsome fellow wherein being a damn good photographer does not matter 😉
Why do all of us have to be slaves to the western concept of beauty?
Indian women are genetically built differently and naturally tend to be more curvaceous, rather to put bluntly hip heavy! Only a small percentage will have stats which fit the correct golden ratio in every manner.
I, an ugly looking runt, experienced success very early but only after I stopped searching for models and started looking at subjects. I saw women as beautiful and made them feel confident enough to consider themselves beautiful, though this is the first time I have been able to put this in words
None of my subjects are professional models or conventionally beautiful (read: someone who would attract wolf whistles as she walks down the street), or now for that matter very young, all of them are 30 years or older.
A more specific example is the gorgeous woman you see here – Nivedita. She is 34, mother of a 10 year old boy, a school teacher, dark skinned. In short you most likely would not look at her twice if you met her and this is not being derogatory to her in any way.
Her pictures however tell another story. In fact some women have confided that this ability to turn on/off the attractiveness is a great asset and I can well imagine
Professional portrait photographers will agree to this – You will be always better off talking to your subject and getting to know her before you being your photo session – Once again every woman unless she has really abused her body into clinical obesity is beautiful and it is up to you as the photographer to demonstrate that – learn to be an empath and soon you will be taking great portraits.
Of course in my case having Swati around helps a lot in many ways and I can rightfully (dear?!) boast that she has been my first successful convert. This was about 14 years ago, when I first took her pictures which we to be sent to prospective grooms, well then that is an entirely different story for some other day…
Oh! In case you have not yet clicked this album has 14 pictures of Nivedita from last Sunday’s shoot and for the technically inclined 3 of them have links to corresponding pictures of the setup used