Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Becoming Famous – A Story in Photos

I have always loved having my picture take.  It’s why my personal Facebook page has about 5000 photos and I have almost 3000 of me and my oneitis.  That’s right!  It might be a record in the dating world for most pictures with the girl who broke your heart.  So when a photojournalist emailed me asking if he could spend a week following me and documenting my life, of course I said yes.
After agreeing, I was a little bit nervous, because lately my primary focus has been on writing articles, posting on this blog and making it sexier, putting together training videos and having phone meetings with other dating companies.  Unfortunately, that is not very exciting on camera.  When I was teaching in London, I had from 5-10 students in field with me every single week, and let’s be honest watching guys hit on girls in bars is interesting as hell to watch.  Me typing at my computer, no so much.
So when Austin Anthony started following me that week I put out a call in Nashville.  I would give free training to anyone who was willing to let my photojournalist hang around.  The photos would be primarily of me and we would make sure not to reveal anyone’s secret identities.  Unfortunately, Nashville has the weakest pickup scene of any city I have ever been to.  So out of 200 guys I personally emailed only about 4 replied.  And all of them chickened out and didn’t show up in the end.
Fortunately, one of my students from a year ago called and was down to party.  It was awesome to see how far he has come along in the last year.  I’m very proud of how the photo project came out as well.  I didn’t change anything from my normal routine.  And so it’s one of the most accurate depictions of my life you could get, without spending a week trailing me.
Austin anthony never uses a flash when he takes his pictures.  He feels it can affect the events as they unfold.  He’s really serious about his craft and does everything he can to stay on the outside of events.  It was really interesting for me.  Like having a scientist there who doesn’t want to accidentally affect the experiment.  He has a really badass camera,  all big and professional.  And those can do things in low light that your average pocket camera just can’t do.  A ton of the pictures don’t come out because they are so dark, but the ones that do come out are REALLY revealing.  There were a couple of occasions where he got more than 20 pictures of me talking to a girl.
These are very valuable teaching tools because he actually captures the body language in a moment.  And it allows me to really see what my students are seeing.  I will be using a ton of these photos on here in the near future, as well as part of my teaching tools.

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