OTOKO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Craft of Male Nude Photography

Anyone armed with a camera can claim to be a photographer, but it takes more than just looking through the view finder, striking a flattering or an erotic pose, and pressing down the shutter release to be a competent photographer.

To be a competent photographer, one has to at least be able to expose the pictures properly. A picture that is properly exposed would have captured all the important areas of the frame. That is, no over-exposure or under-exposure of any area of interest.


Example of an over-exposure, the details of the background are all washed out.

In the digital world, that process has been made simpler by the use of a histogram. A histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of the light intensity of the photograph. If an area of interest is over-exposed to a degree that a color channel has gone beyond the upper limit of 255, that color is no longer correctly represented by the RGB of the pixel, because the recording device can only record up to the value of 255.


We can tell by the bell curve of the histogram, this photograph is over-exposed.

Fortunately, this photograph was saved because it was shot using the RAW format of the Nikon D1H which allows me to adjust the exposure compensation in the Nikon Editor.


By lowering the exposure 2 f-stops, we can now see the details of the background.


We can tell by the bell curve of the histogram, this photograph is better exposed than the one above.


After a little bit of adjustment, this is what you may get.

Getting a photograph properly exposed is just the beginning. Getting it printed optimally takes another set of craft. We will discuss that later.

Taking pictures is a bit like making movies, except we make only the storyboard. Before I take a picture, I first decide what kind of depth-of-field I would want for the picture. The depth-of-field pretty much decides what kind of aperture I will be using to take the picture. If I am at a location where I don't want the background to show up too clearly, I would want a lower depth of field. I control that by opening the aperture as wide as I can and by using the longest focal length available.


In this sample photo, I set the aperture to F4.5 and the focal length to 98 mm. When the aperture is so wide open, I would focus on the model's eyes so the eyes don't appear out of focus. People will always notice when the eyes are out of focus, so I try to avoid that.

Once the aperture is determined, I decide the shutter speed. We don't have much choice, if any, when we take photos outdoor under the sun. Proper exposure requires the correct combination of aperture and shutter speed. Taking photos in-door under controlled lighting offers more flexibility.


This photo was taken using aperture F/20, but shutter speed at 1/4 of a second in order to capture the color of the background lit by two PAR 64s.

The shutter speed is usually determined by the existing key (or main) light. Where to place the key light depends on where we want to give the impression of where the sunlight is coming from or where the main light is located. Fill light is where most people don't pay much attention, but is extremely important.


Here is an example of bad fill light. You can see there are two shadows. In our world where there is only one Sun, we are used to seeing only one shadow, and our photograph should mimic that situation with only one shadow.

We can do that by keeping the fill light about two f-stops below the key light, as we would get from a white fabric reflector, or by placing the fill light behind the camera so the shadow created by the fill light is behind the model where we cannot see.

Once a photograph is properly exposed, the next important thing to do is color correction. Every camera records a color in its own perception. We can photograph a perfect red color (255,0,0) but the outcome would not be (255,0,0).


Here is a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker. According to GretagMacbeth, the white patch should have the value near pure white (255,255,255) and the balck should have the value near pure black (0,0,0). My Nikon D2X recorded the white patch as something like (209,207,197) under the flash and the black patch as something like (8,8,8).


After I color corrected the ColorChecker, the white patch appears like (244,244,244) and the black patch like (4,4,4).


Here is a photograph before color correction.


By applying the same color correction we end up with a photograph like this.

Framing. Rule of 1/3.