I've been making steady progress in my studies of photography over the past 10 years. This year I finally bought an DSLR (a Canon D7), and it has been a joy to really learn how use the controls of a high-performance camera. My 14 year old daughter JuJu and I have been attending photography classes for the past year. Today we attended a model shoot at St. Louis Photo Authority in St. Louis, Missouri, where the owner, Ed Crim provided four models and excellent guidance. It was a lot of fun, as you can see from my work. Today the theme for the models was "guns," which made me a bit apprehensive, but we had a great time shooting models who all had access to guns as props. Here's a sample of the portraits I took. Nothing like having the right equipment and some good teachers. Click for higher res images.

Madison Avenue has worked hard to convince ordinary women that they are not beautiful, and that only Photoshopped anorexic models are worthy of public display. The "Nu Project" set out to photograph ordinary women, in the nude, in a way that displays their natural beauty. I saw this article on Huffpo and just clicked in to see how I would react. Although I didn't react the same way to each of these photos, I found this project compelling for the reasons stated by the creators:

[Photographer Matt Blum] sees the photos as filling a void. "When I started shooting nudes there was no project like it," he told The Huffington Post in an email. "The things that I had seen either used models with typical model bodies or average people who were made to look extremely unimpressive. I figured there was a way to treat women (of any size/shape) like models and photograph them beautifully, respectfully without a lot of sexual under or overtones."