Rick Dones wrote:

i have to disagree with this.......you are the photographer so that makes you the director, also you should be able to comunicate with the model to get what you want out of a shot.....if you just put the model on a beach and say now pose  with out giving any direction  then you are only doing half of your job and you will more often than not get only medicore images.
If you see that the model isn't  doing anything and you continue to shoot then that's your problem. You can't tell your client that the model sucked......

Ah, but if *I* get what I want out of a shoot, and the model thinks that the pics are crappy, THEN what? I can only direct so much. If you got it, you got it.

If I put a model on the beach, I WILL give direction where needed. I will do the best that I can with the model to get them the best pictures that I can. NOW, that all depends on how well the model can pose.

Strangely, I just shot a new, somewhat inexperienced model this week on the beach, and the pictures came out quite nicely. (I may post a few on this thread later).  My FIRST goal is to make sure that my pictures are technically sound, THEN I worry about the model. It doesn't mean crap if the model hit some killer poses and my camera was 2 stops off either way, was out of focus, or had to many distractions in the background.

I have absolutely NO PROBLEM giving a model direction, helping her to achieve the look she is going for. It's a collaboration, but each of us has our responsibilities, also.

To date, I've had no problems with models saying that my work was crappy. If anything, they had more than enough good photos to choose from.

VRG Photography wrote:
Here's my thing:

If the pictures were lit well/correctly, framed correctly, and there were no technical glitches on my end and the pics are usable, then I'm good.

I can't control the way she looks. If she's ugly, the camera won't change that. If she keeps giving me strange looks during the shoot, and it shows up on the images, I can't control that.

If there's something that *I* can control that I didn't do well, then I can see a model not being satisfied with MY work. If the model didn't do a good job of posing, then why should I be the scapegoat? I can see us "sharing" the blame (to a point), but the photographer shouldn't shoulder the blame because a model wasn't pulling her weight.

If one is going to give constructive criticism, let's make sure it is directed towards the right person FIRST.

I totally agree. Obviously before deciding that the photos are bad because of something the photog did, the model needs to examine how he/she could have made them better as well. This thread isn't meant to crap on photogs. I posed the question because I had an incident where I didn't use the photos from a shoot and the photog wanted to know why. He wasn't very nice about it either. I wanted to be honest with him but didn't want to insult him. So I was just curious about how others deal with similar situations.