I spent a good part of Tuesday taking pictures of attractive women.

Perhaps I should clarify that a bit. We’re doing some work on our extranet and the idea came up that we should get some photos of our sales people – some team and individual shots – to show our customers that there are real people at the end of the phone. As I’m “into” photography I naturally volunteered to take the pictures. It was an interesting experience for several reasons.

Firstly, it was nice finally getting to talk to a lot of these attractive women I’ve only seen in the cafeteria and realise how nice they are. It’s amazing how you construct someone’s personality in your head from their appearance but that can turn out to be completely wrong.

It was fun trying to get people relaxed when I was taking their photo. A lot of women (usually the really good looking ones) don’t seem to like their picture being taken so I had to try a bit of banter with some to get them to oblige. And some of the complaints afterwards that they look terrible just mystifies me – why do the pretty ones often have such low self esteem? Still, I wish I’d discovered photography when I was younger and single – it’s a great way to get to meet women!

I also got a glimpse of what a pain being a photographer must be. You’d think that to get a team photo of, say 10 people would be easy enough. Just show them where to stand, get them to smile and click. But you really have to take control of people, get each person to stand in the right place to balance out the shot and pay attention at the back!

I think I’ll stick to the day job, although I’m rather pleased with how they came out. I had to continually resist the urge to go for good portrait shots or something arty. We wanted people to look like they were on the phone or something whereas my natural instinct is to try and get the best shot of people that they’d want to put on their wall at home or something interesting and a bit different. I guess sometimes you have to sacrifice creativity for work. It was fun though!