Thursday. My bland little attitude of Tuesday carried through Wednesday and what can be wrong with that? Excitement is overrated, let me tell you. The world is full of excitement, most of which I could do without. I'm taking today and tomorrow off work to prepare for a studio session I have scheduled for Saturday where I will shoot my first series of nudes. “Hot stuff”, you might say, but from a photographer's standpoint it's a bit trickier than that.

How many photographers have photographed how many nudes over the years? About a berzillion. It's, you know, art. They teach it in schools. How many of them, beyond that first spurt of interest, were worth remembering? I suspect you could say the same about portraits. How many portraits have been taken since the invention of the camera? How many school head shots, business head shots, home snapshots smudged and ugly clog the world's closets, yet I have no problem in getting myself up for a portrait session?

This wasn't always the case. It took me a long time and a lot of photographs before I realized I kept coming back to faces searching for a particular look. Why would the process of learning you like to take candid portraits be any different than learning if you like to take nudes? You just, you know, have to take enough of them to find out. So what I'm going to do Saturday is shoot a bunch of portraits (of an attractive nude woman) and see if they make me smile. They might. Amazing how these problems will sometimes just work themselves out.