Today’s Post by Joe Farace
You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.—Rick Nelson from Garden Party.
There’s a wonderful Peanuts comic strip where Charlie Brown talks to Psychiatrist Lucy who tells him all about the different kinds of fears he may be afflicted with. When she gets to Panophobia, the fear of everything, he says “That’s it!” There are lots of different kinds of phobias but what about a fear of being photographed? I believe it’s real. Copophobia, scoptophobia, or ophthalmophobia are anxiety disorders characterized by a fear of being seen or stared at by others, as in someone looking at them in a photograph.
It’s ophthalmophobia
Back in the original film era,when Mary and I were shooting weddings, we often encountered a mother of the bride, who when she attempted to make their portrait of them insisted that we “don’t get too close.” Mary’s solution to that problem –and it always worked–is covered in this post. I also ran into this phenomenon once when doing a test shoot with a aspiring model who, after I showed her a few of the first shots I made of her, told me, “I didn’t like the way my face looks,” The truth was she had a lovely face and I thought she would be a great model but as someone who deals with my own phobias, I was sympathetic..
I suggested that we make a quick series of head shots and periodically we would stop and look at the photographs I just made. After the first ten headshots, she looked at the images on the camera’s LCD screen and told me she didn’t like any of them. I liked one so much that later I posted it on an on-line modeling forum and received lots of compliments from both models and photographers about it. Then I shot ten more head shots, than ten more after that but she never liked any one of them. So we called it a day and I wished her well. I later saw some images from a photo shoot she did with another photographer and posted on her on-line. modeling portfolio–she never posted any of mine– and in every one of these images her face was very small in the frame. Yet, I repeat she was a lovely looking and had a sweet personality.
There is an old photographic axiom that “if you like the photographer, you will like the photographs.” So maybe she just didn’t like me. I like to think that I’m a lovable guy but sometimes you just don’t get along with a person and maybe my goofy persona rubbed her the wrong way.
As I was typing this it came to mind that the model in question and I didn’t do a warm up series of shots. Some models don’t want to do this and tell me, “let’s just shoot” and, to be honest sometime I forget to mention it, so there’s that. These days I suggest a warm up most of the time and usually we do it but sometimes we don’t. Other suggestions to avoid any dissatisfaction with their images includes advice that my mentor gave me a long time ago and that was “if you don’t talk with the subjects you’re never going to make a good portrait of them.” This is something I usually do even though I am, naturally, an introvert but put a camera in my hand and turn on studio lights and I will act, as my Dad once said, like “I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” Finally, someone suggested I play music during a shoot to lighten the mood. My friend Jack always does this and and has an audio system in his studio; I don’t but maybe I should.
How I made this Portrait: One of the simplest ways to do a series of warm up shot is to start with a series of headshots as I did with Amy, today’s featured model. These are made and discussed before we moved on to other setups and after she was comfortable in the studio. That’s when we created other kinds of images and that was where she played an active part in creating many of the scenarios we photographed, some of which were shot for my Patreon subscribers.
This portrait was made using a single Flashpoint monolight with a 40-inch white umbrella mounted in shoot-through mode that was placed at camera left with a Westcott 30-inch 5-in-1 Reflector located at camera right used for fill. A Savage Universal 5×7-foot Infinity grey vinyl background was hung on JTL background stands. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 45mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/9 and ISO 200.
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography and includes information on all of the cameras used as well as the complete exposure data for each image. Used copies are $33.71.as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format