To Be or Not To Be, Obscene

I decided to take today off so I wouldn't lose Vacation Time at work.  Although I had a shoot scheduled at 6:00 PM today, I figured I could squeeze in a quick shoot.  I messaged Tonya and luckily she had today off, too.  We discussed my ideas and she agreed to shoot with me.  Again, my fave is Black and White pictures, so I wanted to do some more emotive work.  The theme was "The Other Woman, "  which would include some rope, a cigarette and a glass of Crown Royal.  Tonya was cool with the idea and is always professional, well aside from her "Power Ranges" text alert.

I checked the ambient light from our West Facing windows, but decided it needed a little bump.  I grabbed one of my studio strobes along with a 24" x  28" softbox and placed it outside the window.  I placed a reflector  just to my right to bounce light from the softbox back at Tonya.  All these shots were pretty much done the same way with the reflector acting as a fill.  Also, all shots were done in Manual Model since Aperture Priority Mode and Nikon CLS doesn't work with my Studio strobes. We wrapped after an hour and about 75 pictures.  This shoot was purely for me, but I did manage to get one shot Tonya could use for her Model Mayhem port. I'm hoping she likes it, but so far other FLICKR friends like, too.

So why the title of the blog?  Well the picture above was posted on MySpace, yeah I know, on my Photography page.  Within an hour of posting I received an e-mail from the MySpace admins stating that my picture violated their Terms of Use Policy for containing one, or all of the following, nudity, pornography, violence and that the site is for children 13 years of age and older.  If any of you have cruised around MySpace, there are plenty of women in poses that are truly pornographic, or degrading with little cutesy stars covering their nipples or their genitalia.   So what are your thoughts?  Does my picture portray women in a negative way?  Is it degrading, or depicting violent and abusive behavior?

The remainder of the pictures were left alone including the second one in this blog. So I'll get off my soapbox and post pics elsewhere, in the little niches of the Internet.

What did I learn?
Don't be lazy and get that other light - I had little time to shoot today, but I should have grabbed one more light to act as an accent light.  There are some pics where Tonya's hair is blocked up.

I have one more shoot this week and then I'm off until Oct. 18, which will be a group shoot up in Fresno.  there's plenty of Models who have been messaging me to work with them.  that will definitely be a tiring day.

Thanks for reading and putting up with my rant, and That's a Wrap!!!