Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“He remembered that he did have one thing going for him – his memory.” ―
If you’re interested in glamour photography you might want to follow Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) on Instagram because of the inspiration that her images can provide. On Mondays one of her fan sites publishes portraits of her wearing corsets, so last year I thought I’d try #corsetmonday here and have decided to keep it going in 2023.
There was a time in my glamour photography journey when I went through a phase when I wanted to photograph every model wearing a corset. This included a series of lighting equipment reviews I wrote for the print edition of Shutterbug but the editorial staff never allowed any of these photographs to be published. Since they wouldn’t let you see these images, I’m going to try to publish many of them—including some new photographs, like today, as part of the Corset Monday series.
Some of the models, like last week’s, have either never appeared in this blog or may be under represented. Other models, like the amazing Erin Valakari, have appeared on this site many times and today’s featured portrait was from a recent session that was both a flashforward and flashback for both of us. It was a flashback to our last pre-pandemic session in November of 2018. And this session was a flashback to a previous post and shoot when I hoped our next portrait session would occur—and this is from that one.
I produced a short (three-minute) behind-the-scenes video based on this session with Erin where I created today’s featured image for my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos. The direct link to this 18+ Age Restricted video is here.
How I made this portrait: Erin is an artist, model and cosplayer,and is a sweet and lovely model who is totally professional in her work ethic. What’s more, her hard working style is combined with an attitude that compliments a model who is stylish, talented and sexy. You can follow her on Instagram at @valatheartist.
I photographed Erin in my home studio with a lighting setup that used a Paul C. Buff DigiBee with Plume Ltd Wafer softbox that was placed at camera right. Another DigiBee with a 18-inch OMNI reflector mounted was placed behind a 42 x72-inch Scrim Jim with a white translucent cover that, during the session, alternated from being used as a large diffusion scrim with the DigiBee turned on or as a reflector with the DigiBee turned off. In the back of my studio (camera left) was a Paul C Buff Alien Bee with 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box being used as fill. The background was a Red Apple Colorsmack that was produced by Silverlake Photo Accessories. The camera was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH/MEGA O.I.S lens (at 45mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/10 and ISO 200.