Playboy Photographer Stephen Wayda Has Dream Job

There comes a lot of skepticism with the job of photographing naked women. Mainly, people don’t really see it as a “job.” It seems more like the guys who landed this profession kind of just got lucky.

Stephen Wayda is a fine example of a chosen lucky one. He’s been photographing Pamela Anderson since her first days in the business, along with countless other women. As we sit in the Playboy studio in Santa Monica, CA, he explains what proves him different than the slew of other talented photographers trying to snatch his full-time job shooting for Playboy magazine.

“There’s guys standing in line who want this job every day,” Wayda says. “It’s not like they don’t try new guys — they try new guys as much as they can. It’s just hard to do. It looks easy, but it’s hard.”

There are apparently many parts to the challenge. It’s not just traveling the world and getting to look at hundreds of stunning, naked women through a close-up lens. Wayda has to make the photos look as realistic as possible, he has to make the model comfortable, and he has to keep things interesting at all times.

“The challenge is how to keep making something new and fresh,” Wayda says. “I’m always looking for ways to reinvent the picture, while keeping it within the context of what the magazine is.”

Playboy magazine is known for consistently choosing a certain type of woman for their spreads. They feature models that aren’t typical “fashion models.” Playboy’s Playmates” tend to be more mainstream in facial features, and more curvaceous in body type. Wayda believes he can work equally well with all ages and types of models.

“I sincerely believe that I can make anybody…” Wayda pauses. “Well, how do you say this gPamela Anderson, pictures, picture, photos, photo, pics, pic, images, image, hot, sexy, bikini, beach, Playboy, Stephen Wayda

Stephen Wayda photography; copyright Playboy

raciously? The fashion photographers get young, beautiful girls. That girl back there?”

He points to the lobby, where the centerfold he just shot is sitting on the couch.

“Point a lens at her, and anybody would be a star. But, not everyone is a 20-year-old beauty. Everyone has their uniqueness, and I know how to maximize what they have. With my job, it’s making people as beautiful as they can be — and they want to be.”

It certainly seems that Wayda was placed on this earth to help stars look like superstars. He discovered his interest in photography while living in Utah, writing for the Salt Lake Tribune.

Interviewing people and writing hard news wasn’t quite as creative a gig as Wayda desired. His grandfather left him a set of cameras when he passed away, which Wayda used to photograph his girlfriend at the time.

“With the cameras, I learned how to take pictures, and I started taking pictures for the newspaper articles,” Wayda reminisces. “Anything from a picture of a freak tornado that came into town, to a 3 a.m. murder scene. I shot guys on Death Row, and county commissioners. I even have pictures of Nixon when he came to visit.”

Wayda worked odd hours for the newspaper. He had a friend who offered to let him use his studio space to take more photographs of women, so Wayda found himself practicing photography more and more.

“It was a way for a guy who didn’t have great looks or great money to meet a lot of girls; by taking pictures,” Wayda says. “So that worked well for me for quite a while.”

On an innovative whim, Wayda then broke new ground in the world of photography, which proved to be the break-in for his career taking pictures.

“Reproduction in newspapers was questionable for photographs at the time,” Wayda says. “So, I came up with a method of getting the photograph to reproduce.”

After developing this method to print photographs in the paper, Wayda took his invention and brought it to the biggest department store in the area, owned by the Mormon Church, called ZCMI. They immediately took to the idea, and he began shooting catalogues and advertisements for them.

“Eventually the newspaper said I had to choose between the two,” Wayda says. “I chose photography.”Arnold Schwarzenegger, pictures, picture, photos, photo, pics, pic, images, image, Stephen Wayda

Stephen Wayda photography; copyright Wayda and Associates Inc.

Through this job came plenty of models. Wayda was living “the life” in Utah, living in the mountains and skiing all the time that he wasn’t shooting for different local clients. He met a man named Dwight Hooker, who’d recently retired from being a photographer for Playboy, but was still shooting for them occasionally. Hooker told Wayda that if he could provide him with models, that he’d allow Wayda to come along to the shoots.

“[Hooker] was great. He was like the professor,” Wayda recalls. “He was my champion, in the sense that he would always talk to me, and spend a lot of time with me. He didn’t think that I would really make it, though. He put in the time because I was interested.”

With Hooker’s influence, Wayda began taking Playboy-style photographs and submitting them to Playboy. He got rejected often in the beginning, until Playboy’s West Coast Photo Editor Marilyn Grabowski decided to give Wayda the chance he was persistently asking for.

“Marilyn gave me opportunities to succeed and fail, but each time I failed, she gave me another chance,” Wayda says. “I persevered, because it was a way that I saw that I could live in Utah and still be a photographer.”

“There were plenty of people who didn’t think I’d go very far, when I first started at Playboy,” Wayda says. “There was a note from an associate photo editor of Playboy that said it was too bad I didn’t have the talent to match my opportunity.”

Wayda tore on ahead, not giving anyone’s opinion too much credit. He was on a mission, and that mission was to get to a point where he could be confident in his abilities as well as consistent on the job. He found ways to make himself indispensable, providing what unique contributions he could, for the magazine.

“Eventually, I found a couple of Utah girls that Playboy accepted,” Wayda recalls. “I traded them, in the sense that Ken Marcus, one of the main photographers at the time, took one of the girls to photograph for the centerfold. I watched how he did it, and then I got to shoot the other girl.”

“Both girls got published,” he continues, leaning back with a smile, “And I got my first centerfold with a Utah girl.”

From then on, Wayda was increasingly assigned projects. For 18 years, he commuted back and forth from Utah to Los Angeles. He was passionate about his life in the mountains, and trying very hard to maintain both separate, extremely different lives. However, this proved to become impossible when his daughter was born.

Wayda moved to Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, trading the obsession with skiing for horses. He also began to shoot for different clients, now that he was full-time in Hollywood, and expanded his subjects to celebrities.

“You know, the thing that I’ve found is that most people say that celebrities are just terrible to work with, and they’re not. They’ve always been wonderful,” Wayda says.

He has worked with actors and actresses, such as Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. The celebrity he’s shot the most — by far — is Pamela Anderson. The two have developed an interesting relationship over the years of working together.

“Pamela’s just fun,” Wayda says, smiling. “It’s always fun to take her picture. She’s always on; she’s always bigger than life; she’s Stephen Wayda; copyright Scott Curtisalways reinventing herself.”

“We’ve gone through her beach phase, her femme fatale phase, to Europe, to the glam look, the rocker, to stuff at her house with her kids, with her washing the dog. If there’s a picture of Pam, I’ve pretty much done it,” Wayda continues.

With all this time spent together, the two have almost gotten to the point where it’s hard to come up with new materials and ideas for her shoots.

Over the years, he’s still had to learn plenty other than how to shoot Anderson in different ways. The challenges of photography never subside. It’s a constantly evolving art that relies on so many different things coming together perfectly for a single, frozen moment.

“Every shoot is like a puzzle,” Wayda says. “How do you make it look real? How do you make the most out of the person?”

Wayda has developed a pre-shoot routine, a sort of consultation to ensure that both he and the subject of the shoot get what they’re looking for. He’s not really concerned about poses and styling. What really makes a picture phenomenal is the attitude expressed by the person being shot.

“I talk to [the subjects] about attitude, and how we’re going to get that attitude,” Wayda explains. “I want them to feel something, rather than think. If I’m shooting a Playmate, I equate it to if they were having sex. If they were having sex, they’re not thinking, ok, left hand here, right hand there… that’s terrible sex. So, it’s the same thing about the shooting: I don’t want them to think about what they’re doing, I want them to feel it.”

(Proof alone that Wayda is a veteran in his field: Telling Playmates what bad sex is.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Playboy photos is how little retouching they actually need. Wayda has spent so many years not relying on photo editing, that he can shoot a picture fresh, and it will look ready for print. A look through the centerfold shots he’d taken a mere twenty minutes before the interview leaves no doubt about that.

These days, as more and more photographers rely on the transformative abilities of Photoshop, it’s hard to tell if the picture taken on the shoot will be published looking anything like the original.

“That would be my biggest complaint; how much retouching goes on these days,” Wayda says. “The girlStephen Wayda; copyright Marko Sanginettos look plastic, their skin has no texture.

Wayda refuses to let the changing times put him out of a job, however. He’s accepted that photography is constantly changing, and plans to keep changing with it.

“Still photography is going to be minimized, as the Internet becomes more prominent,” Wayda says. “It’s hard to see still pictures playing a big part of the commercial world, twenty years from now. If you develop other things, you stay fresh. Every time I do different things, I bring the enthusiasm back.”

This may be the secret behind the man who’s acquired a ranch and some twenty horses throughout his years of photographing nude women.

“I’ve had more in my life than I ever expected,” Wayda says. “I have a job more than I ever expected. I have a job more than other people have said they’ve expected. I have been blessed more than I’ve ever expected to be blessed.”

Don’t hate him; hate the game that makes little-to-no sense at all. And keep on trying. There’s always a chance that you’ll be that exception. Hell, if Wayda didn’t play the odds, he’d still be back in Utah.

For more amazing photography, be sure to visit Stephen Wayda’s official website – StephenWayda.com.

https://www.celebnation.com/2020/05/30/stephen-wayda-how-to-shoot-the-perfect-playmate-pictorial/

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