Artistic Exploration... to Deviation?

In my quest to find the elusive 'spending money' my friends speak of, I have become more serious about some of my hobbies. A big one of these, which I never thought about seriously before, was taking pictures of myself. What I always saw as boredom/vanity/creative outlet has time and again gotten my friends to chime in with 'You're so pretty!' and 'You should be a model!' after repeatedly clicking the like button. Maybe that was stretching things a tad... regardless. It led me to decide to take a stab at this 'modeling'.


1. I am not a size 0. I'm more a size 10, sometimes a 12 (sometimes an 8 too)
2. I do not believe I'm breathtakingly gorgeous
3. Besides holding up my phone and grinning, I have posed for very few photos.


So, perhaps not the best decision on my part. I started out at ModelMayhem.com. I have a few friends with profiles on the site, who do work from time to time, so I thought it was a safe bet. After carefully selecting the photos from my phone that showed me in my best light, uploading them all, measuring myself, and creating a bio, I waited for my profile to be approved.


24 hours later, I was told I had been denied. Ouch.


Luckily it was an easy fix! The reason for my denial was the low quality of my photos. Understandable, considering cell phone pictures weren't considered studio quality the last time I checked. The issue is, I have very few friends with good cameras, and even less with any skill at taking photos. Narrow it down to the ones in my area, then the ones with free time, and my options were less than skimpy. What's a naive model to do?


Craigslist. Gigs>Creative: TFP(Trade for Print) work


I degraded myself, I know, but I laid out a few ground rules. I would bring an escort to any shoots, and I would only do tasteful shoots. The response was overwhelming. Not all top quality, most definitely, but I found a few great leads. Those few great leads led to some great conversations. Spitballing ideas for shoots, locations, props, the works. And those conversations? Well those led to me scheduling not 1, but 3 photo shoot sessions so far. One of which is paid, another might be in the news soon (part of a great project  the photographer is working on), and the other? Just another experienced person well worth working with.


Now, there is a catch. You have to be open to being creative. Everyone I'm going to work with I feel comfortable trusting. Also, I will be implementing the use of contracts with my photographers. Not because they aren't wonderful trustworthy people, but because it's important to cover yourself. You don't want to end up being left not only with no pay, but with inability to use the photos you took to market yourself. So we'll see how this goes.


I know my writing has petered off here at the end, as far as quality goes. I'm sorry to my (loyal?) readers. I'm still new at this. Anyway, until next musing...


And yes, I will post <some> pictures. Just for you.