Today’s Post by Joe Farace
My techniques for this kind of portraiture are really simple and don’t require lots of expensive equipment; all you really need is a camera and a subject. But that book was published before I fell in love with mirrorless photography.
Boudoir photography, or as I prefer to call it, intimate portraiture, is a perfect medium for mirrorless cameras, such as the Panasonic Lumix GH4 that I used to make the portrait of Pam Simpson at right. They’re perfect for many reasons, starting with being able to use a camera that’s less intrusive than a large DSLR.
How I Made this Photo: Today’s image is from my fifteenth portrait session with Pam. Most of our shoots together were produced for images that would be used in lighting equipment reviews for the former print edition of Shutterbug, but this particular session resulted in a album of photographs for her personal use creating an album (below) that was created using the Zno Albums website and software.
At this point in our photographic relationship. I had stopped shooting Pam with DSLRs and focused instead of using my Olympus and Panasonic Micro Four-thirds cameras and lenses. For this session Pam was photographed standing near the window seat in my home’s guest bedroom using a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Olympus M. Zuiko 45mm f/1.8. Lighting for the portrait was from a combination of window light and a 32-inch Westcott reflector that was placed at camera left producing an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/2.5 and ISO 800. The JPEG file was used for retouching and processing, which I did using Imagenomics’ Portraiture. and then processed using Vivenza and Color Efex plug-ins.
The mirrorless camera’s smaller size may help with its ease of mobility but the biggest shooting advantage is the EVF, which lets you see the image at the moment of capture. You don’t have to flip the camera to chimp breaking the rhythm of the shoot. Instead, it’s right there in the viewfinder and you can see it without removing your eye from the camera. You won’t miss any blinks because you see them right away, something you can’t do with a DSLR and be able to instantly re-shoot,
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $21.87, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price of $8.8 and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.