Friday, July 9, 2010

The Woes of doing Model Testing



About a week or so ago I had the opportunity to meet Doda, a cocky young male model that asked me if I would be willing to do a test for him. He found me on modelmayhem.com. Normally, most of my tests go fairly smooth, so there isn’t much that can turn the scene into something uncomfortable, but I think this one really caught me in a bad way. And I was a bit upset by the fact that he ageed to do a shirtless shoot, but meanwhile I would provide a shot of him in a suit and some headshots. All came fine with the suit shots and headshots, but when it came to doing the shirtless shots, he suddenly said, ‘Oh, I don’t feel so well’. It ended there. He wasn’t about to go any further with the shoot, and I wasn’t going to coerce him to do so. It just really irked me that he was only wanting to do what he wanted for his own port. He then asked if I could provide him with all the RAW files to the shoot. I said no, explaining to him that I need to edit and retouch the images. He then said he was studying to be a graphic artist (really?), and that he could retouch them. I decided that I would offer him a set of medium resolution files on the spot of all the images taken. I didn’t feel exactly good about it, but it was the most I would offer at the time. I may not know what the perfect policy is behind this, but this was the first time I felt that this was not the way it should be. Regardless, I did pick out a few good images from the shoot.

To see the other shots from the shoot, please take a look at my new website as hosted on Photoshelter.

Special thanks to Patryk Chaou for bringing in the clothes, courtesy of Dunhill, Wil Wu for the makeup, and assistant Nathan Chan.

Reasons for shifting to Photoshelter and the future of The Asian Male website



A few weeks ago, I decided that it was about time for me to join back Photoshelter, and to give it another go. Photoshelter, a few years ago, was the platform that I used for my back of house work with clients, a place where I would upload images from a photo shoot, and have clients pick and choose which ones they liked for me to do final retouching. It worked really well back then, until times hit hard in 2008, with both a bad business decision and the coincidental meltdown of the world economy right during that time. I had to cut back on costs and I decided that Photoshelter had to be cut from my expenditures.

That time has passed luckily, and I’m glad to re-open an account with them, albeit my images had been purged (not a problem since I have internal backup). This time around, I decided too that I was going to make use of Photoshelter more, and to test it for use as a photographer’s website, besides using it only for back of house activities. Right now, the way it looks is like so: http://normyip.photoshelter.com, which is based on their Standard account using their Maui (only one available for this account). I believe it looks fairly good, although it’s not exactly the color/font that I like.

Some asked me why am I using Photoshelter’s platform for my website, when my old website (www.normyip.com) is already looking so good. The main reason is for flexibility and speed of changing and adding photos, plus there is the added advantage of SEO, which apparently more difficult to achieve on my old design, designed using basic html using frames. I am not an IT pro, but I do know that I my website is probably missed by most crawlers. Frames is out.

Right now, my Photoshelter website and normyip.com website are separate, but most likely, I will point my www.normyip.com to the photoshelter one in the days to come, or maybe buy a new domain completely. We’ll see how it goes.

Another thing that is in the works is the shift of my Asian male images into the Photoshelter account, so that all the photographs will be available for viewing and purchase there. So for those that know of my work and want to see more Asian males in front of my camera, please support by making a small purchase, when I complete the uploading and pricing. And for those that don’t know of my Asian male photography, here is the existing website as it stands: www.theasianmale.com.



I know, pretty old stuff isn’t it? And most of the images were done back on cheap monitor and I couldn’t see the differences or nuances in my retouching. I’m far better now at retouching and such, but my eyesight has deteriorated. I mean, I have to hold a menu farther back to see the text. Arrrgggh!

But the big question is what should I do with the Asian Male website. Maybe I can get some comments from you guys? and gals! Should I make theasianmale.com a collective website? whereby any photographer that photographs the Asian male in an artistic manner can submit images to me or a moderator for inclusion? If anyone has any thoughts on this, it would be greatly appreciated.