Chicks With 'Tudes

You know the kind of 'tudes, i.e., the attitudes, I'm talking about: Bad girl attitudes. I love when bad girls get in front of my camera. (As is often the case.)

Sometimes, I have to coerce the inner bad girl out of the model. Other times, it's simply their everyday normal demeanor. Angie is a perfect example. She oozes bad girl. No direction was necessary. The image (left) was the very first click I snapped when she stepped in front of me. (Not counting the one where my two strobes failed to fire.) Throughout the set, Angie just gave me more and more of it, of her BGA that is. (Bad Girl Attitude.) I was in heaven.

I don't know how to exactly describe a bad girl's attitude. It's something that shows in her eyes and the way she holds her body. When you see her in real life or in moving pictures, you see the attitude in her walk and in her movements. You hear it in her voice. It's not so much what she says but how she says it. And it always gets my blood flowing.

I was shooting yesterday in a sleazy bar in a bad part of town. The beer-joint was small. The ceilings were low and painted black. There wasn't much room to set lights (where I'd prefer them to be) for that oft-seen glamour look. I decided to go a bit more guerrilla with my pretty-girl-shooting photo-techniques, keeping it minimal and shooting in a manner and style that better reflected the actual environment-- more in the "sense" of the place rather than in pictures that made it look like something other than what it was.

Obviously, I still needed to deliver the kinds of photographs my client was paying me to snap. But I didn't want to overly glamourize the environment or the models. Don't know if I succeeded. Maybe I'm just imagining things and deluding myself thinking I did? (You can take the pretty girl shooter out of the normal pretty girl shooting environments but you can't take the glam out of the pretty girl pics?)

I'm just thinking out loud here.

Anyway...

I'm usually inclined to focus on a certain kind of sexy allure in my photos. The allure I usually shoot is more predictable. Predictable for my work, that is. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. It's probably a good thing as far as my regular clients are concerned. They appreciate consistency. They hire me for consistency. As boring as that often is... for me.