What to do if your friends aren't models

There you are in your studio, trying out some new lighting equipment, you look through your lens and what do you see? Is it a pair of piercing blue eyes beaming back at you from a pale white face? Is it a head of glowing black hair flowing down around a pair of pronounced shoulders before disappearing into the black of the backdrop? No, it's a mass of wiry beard hair surrounding a wide pair of lips that are saying, "Do you want me to take my shirt off?"

Some people say it's easy to take good pictures when you have a beautiful model to photograph. I wouldn't know. My models drink all my beer.

But my solution was simple.

Change models.

It's never too late to join the circus.

If you shoot it they will come. Perhaps it's not that simple. Or maybe it just depends how you look at it.

Over the past few months I've been feverishly working at creating a business for myself, something that I can be proud of and that will get me out of this daily commute to a job in which I'm quite literally spinning my wheels. We all want to be happy, not just in our jobs but in our daily lives. We all want to grow, not just financially but metaphysically, emotionally – whether we want to admit it or not. Then why do so many of us spend so many hours a week doing something that does nothing to improve the levels of our our bodies and minds – giving us what just enough to survive and keep us complacent enough to come back for more. You, like many people, may have enough to pay the mortgage, put food on the table, dump a bit of money into savings for the month (if you're lucky) and think to yourself, “We're doing alright.” You may even have enough for a vacation, yes those one or two week per year jaunts that make you smile and think you've got it really good. But inevitably, invariably you will end up back at work, putting more time in so that you may once again repeat the cycle for the next month or the next year. Or the next twenty.

Well I want out of that cycle. I've never been that person who would work his whole life dreaming of the future, working toward that ever-elusive and highly-sought-after word: retirement. The very word sets emotion on fire in some people. It's that golden time in our imagined future in which we can wake up and do what we want, not answering to anybody, travel, live where we want to live, finally be who we want to be. Well that's not me. I'm not going to delve into the 9 to 5 just so one day I can hope to be my own person and once and for all have my freedom. More often than not by the time you're able to support yourself and finally “retire” you're no longer young anymore. And all those things you dreamed of doing, all those places you dreamed of seeing may not be as easy to get to as you once imagined. What a pity it would be to have given all my good years away to someone else.

So here I stand with camera in hand, rain on my shoulder and determination in my soul putting my best foot forward. If this doesn't work I'll try a different approach, a different angle, a different filter. I know if I shoot it they will come. That's how I see it.