I was arranging a photo-shoot with a model the other day. She said that she wanted to do Maxim/FHM/Blender style shots for her portfolio. I've never tried to shoot in that style and, come to think of it, I'm not really sure what that style is.

So I had to do some "research" and I thought I'd share what I discovered.

So far, I've found that Maxim, FHM, Blender, Zoo and others all seem to have pretty badly designed, bandwidth-intensive websites. I'm guessing that they'd rather you bought the magazine at newsstands or just got a subscription. Maxim seemed to have the most obvious but least irritating problem. When paging through the Girls of Maxim, there are links to the right for "previous girl" and "next girl". As I was paging through the photos in one set, the same girl showed up as both the previous and next girl depending on what photo I was on. I don't think it's cookie related because I'm pretty sure I allowed cookies. On the other hand, it's not like I felt I needed to view their galleries in any particular order, so it was pretty easy to get over that one.

Somewhere in the combination of websites, my browser stopped loading some of the images. Not so good for image based content. Zoo was the most obvious there in that their navigation images of previous, current and next image didn't always have thumbnails and there was no alt text to display when the load failed. You could still click the spaces where images should be, so it wasn't a crippling problem. I suspect bad javascript is the culprit and I can't guarantee what site was the source of the problem since I had several tabs open.

Here's what I've found for style and quality of images so far. All the magazines seem based on getting sexy shots of girls and the quality of those shots isn't really the important part.

Maxim seemed to have the best quality photographs overall along with the best sets and props. Some of the more striking ones being taken with a dual-edgelight set up which is kind of an obvious aproach, but very effective. Their lighting, pose and composition were varied and interesting. They seemed to genuinely want to make good photos that happened to be of hot women in lurid positions and settings.

FHM had the least content. The composition seemed reliable and the poses varied in quality depending on the model in question. The lighting tended to be pretty simple and uninspired, usually a basic beauty light setup. One thing that they had plenty of though, was nipples. Lots of nipples. Generally sitting on huge bags of silicon.

Blender had the standard band promo photos from the record label. It's hard to identify a style there since all the photographs were taken by different people. It felt like trying to define what style defines comic books. Since there is no "Blender style" I'll have to move on from that one.

Zoo, was linked from either Maxim or FHM. I forget which. Again, they tended to have a wide variety of photographs where the important part was that there be a bare-breasted woman in them. Art was generally sacrificed to content, but sometimes they had some real stunners. I couldn't really define a style, but I'll keep trying...

Another thing that I noticed about all these magazines is that they were not above phoning it in and using promotional shots instead of taking their own and that they shared quite a bit among them. I was never on Stuff's website, but I saw several Stuff watermarks.

Anyway, I'll post some stuff from that shoot when it happens and we can all decide if I hit it on the head or not.

--Ben

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