Top Photographers Shoot Coffee Table Books

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Competition is fierce in male modeling and a photographer may prefer to choose a guy for a tame advertising campaign who is also willing to pose nude. These nudes are called outtakes because they are not used in the campaign.

Photographers often publish these outtakes in coffee table books.

Coffee Table books are hardcover books that rest on coffee tables in people's living rooms. They are not the kind of book that get stored on a shelf. People want to show off their taste for beauty by leaving coffee table books out for people to see.

They tend to be oversized and of heavy construction and cost $80, $100 or even $200.

During the fifth season of Seinfeld, an episode dealt with Kramer wanting to write a coffee table book about coffee tables. His idea was for the coffee table book to have legs built into the back cover and cupholders built into the front cover, so the book itself could be turned into a coffee table.

Coffee table books usually contain photography. Common subjects include nature photography, Ansel Adams, architectural buildings, pinup girls and fashion models and male models. Coffee table books can include artistic nude photographs of models.

Ironically, male models want nude photos of themselves to appear in a coffee book. Appearing in a coffee table book can be a tremendous boost to a male model's career. Photos in coffee table books are not the type of trashy photos you see on the internet. Coffee table books are not designed for people to get their jollies from viewing them. The photos printed in these books are high class, and sophisticated. If sleazy porn photos were printed in a book, nobody would shell out $100 to buy it.

One of the most famous coffee table books is titled "Bear Pond" and featured many models who also posed for Abercrmobie and Fitch. Bear Pond also featured Eric Nies, who appeared on the original MTV's Real World. Nies was once quoted as saying his shoot was a strange experience of running around naked with other guys for five days. Bear Pond currently sells for $425 among collectors.

How can a male model appear in a coffee table book? The photographer includes photos of models with whom he has worked over a period of time. He publishes a book once he has collected enough high quality photos. It all starts with an ad campaign. Advertising agencies hire professional photographers to shoot their ad campaigns. The photographer then looks for models to hire for this ad campaign.

Ad campaigns never include nudity. (You can't print a photo of a model's johnson in a Target ad, after all.) However, the photo shoot for ad campaign serves a dual purpose for the photographer. Photographers shoot nude outtakes of models that are not used for the ad campaign. The photographer submits the tame version to the ad agency and later publishes the nude outtake in his coffee table book.

This is why there might be a photo in a coffee table that is strikingly similar to a photo that appeared in a national ad campaign. For example, you might see a photo in an Abercrombie catalog that shows of a guy wearing boxers along a bamboo fence on a beach. Open up a coffee table book and you will see the same model standing totally nude in front of the same fence. This nude photo is an outtake that was created at the same time as the tame version.

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