No model photography

I have Alex in the party car with her Trip from Kaiserslautern met. A pleasant atmosphere for conversation quickly emerged, which had nothing to do with the not particularly sober environment in which we found ourselves. After the trip we stayed in this modern thing called Facebook and we met at one or two St. Pauli-related events in RL. At some point Alex - who says she always looks "stupid" in photos - had the completely absurd wish to be photographed. By me!

Yes, of course that has its price: in this case my desire for flash photography in broad daylight. Poor Alex had really gotten herself into something: she had to pretend for hours as if she was having fun wandering around St. Pauli with a guy almost twice her age. Furthermore, it was autumnally cool and looked like it would rain when we began our photographic journey of discovery.

That's what it's like when you think you're not photogenic but would still like to have pictures of yourself. That's what it's like when you get involved with a guy who only wants one thing from you: your body. For hours. And again and again.

And before you get the wrong impression: I wasn't trying to recreate some unrealistic TV show about models. And I continue to be sehr glucklich verheiratet.

But we all feel uncomfortable in front of the camera at first. There should at least be a humorous and confidential atmosphere when taking photos. This arises in a different way for everyone.

We are all confronted day in and day out with a completely distorted body image that makes us believe we are unphotogenic. And of course it doesn't help that there is an inflation of casual smartphone-quality snapshots on the world's social media platforms. This only makes the difference to the so-called lifestyle photo series from major fashion magazines even greater.

So I found it very exciting to see what images that the person depicted would enjoy looking at can be achieved with a person who is untrained in front of the camera and a little bit of light. I thank Alex for agreeing to this experiment.

A few weeks ago I sent Alex the first picture as a teaser and she has been using it as her Facebook profile picture ever since. This also shows uninvolved people that she likes the picture and she likes herself in the picture. It's nice, of course, that the picture received a lot of positive comments and almost 100 likes. Apparently it's not just us who like the photo.

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Personally, I like the different visual effects that were created. By the way, the images are hardly post-processed, there are just different presets on top. In my opinion, the afternoon with Alex was really worth it. Thanks Alex!