As someone said I should submit this Journal Entry as a News Article, so here it goes:

This thread might be interesting to read for people who have no previous experience in nude photography and interesting to contribute to by other nude photographers.

I often get asked "where do you find all these beautiful women"?

This question always strikes me as odd, beacause it makes me think that the person asking it is supposing that this must be a special feat or talent ... but I am not actively "looking" or searching for these models most of the time. And when I have found interested and interesting women to model for me, they are not paid professional models, but amateurs.

Of course, when you have no previous experience in nude photography, it may be difficult to get models interested, based on your previous body of work. It must be awkward to ask colleagues or female friends the question, when you have nothing to show for it so that they could judge your abilities in the field. So here's what I did: For my first ever nude shoot I hired a pro, meaning a model who was used to the whole process and who earned money by doing it.

That way, at least the model, if not I, knew what to expect, and if I botched the shots, she couldn't care less, as she got paid anyway and she hadn't to be embarrassed in a "my colleague from work saw me naked and now the shots turned out like shit"-kind of way, since we would probably never meet again.

Also, there was only one nervous person on the set, not two, like if I had asked a friend for the "first time". Since the model was very comfortable with being naked (otherwise she would not do it professionally), I could concentrate on all the technicalities of the shoot, and pretty soon, it was as if it was an everyday portrait or fashion shoot for me too.

So then, I had some material which I could show around, and apparently, other women saw that I wasn't too bad at it and some of them said yes when I asked the question (some of them also said no, of course, but asking is always free, and you loose nothing by asking).
I also had a great idea for the shoots. I didn't want to ask models for the classic nude images they probably thought of. I invented my own little project, to make my request stand out and to distinctly position me in the "artistic" category.
I mean, which women likes to have a complete stranger take nude pictures of herself that could have been shot by her own BF or husband: Bad lighting, no attention to detail, unbecoming poses or facial expressions .... so I took very good care to mind all those things from the beginning and to even add a little extra speciality. If the woman gives me her trust to model for me; naked and for free, I must at least give her good images back to repay that trust, not just some plain vanilla boob shots lit with a bulb from above, to put it bluntly.

I do not want to bash other nude images here on dA. I just sometimes wish the photographers would pay more attention to details ....

I started doing nudes by using the projection technique. You'll see these images in my gallery, where I project images or textures onto the model. This was something that generated a lot of interest, as it was "different".

(Well, I had been practicing on portrait photography for 2 years before I even started thinking about doing nudes, so the attention to detail was there already, through practice).

So, now, how do I find my models....
I am of the opinion, if the woman is interested, I should let het come to me. It should not be me to approach her. So I do not walk the streets and chat up strangers, I find this approach too aggressive and I think, it is only seldom crowned with success. Here's what I do: I place small free ads in the local online billboards of newspapers, universities, magazines, etc. with a link to my webpage. If someone is interested, THEY decide to go see my webpage and if they like the photos, THEY decide to contact me. These two conscious decisions by the model-to-be herself are a guarantee that it is her own free will and I did not force myself upon her on the street. Those who eventually contact me are almost certainly going to become my models, because THEY asked me, not I them. Of course, I have the freedom to pick those that *I* like too, from those who contact me. What is sure though, that I have the luxury of only picking people who are interested in doing it to begin with. (Something you don't know when you approach a woman in the train or the supermarket with that question).

After a certain amount of time and results, the word-of-mouth is also starting to work and I get requests that are not triggered by ads, but by friends of friends who have seen my work.

So, basically, to sum up and answer the question "How do you find all these models", I can reply "I sit back, relax and wait" ....