Today’s Post by Joe Farace
It’s not just about being sexy, it’s about being confident and me being confident in my sexuality. —Megan Thee Stallion
If you’re interested in glamour photography you might want to follow the Instagram feed of Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) because she posts some inspirational images. Each Monday one of her Instagram fan sites publishes a series of glamour portraits of her wearing a corset, so I that’s where I came up with the idea—OK, I stole i— for #CorsetMonday for this blog.
There was a time when I went through a phase that, I’m guess I’m still doing it, where I asked models to wear a corset during our shoots together. When I was writing and photographing models for lighting equipment reviews for the former print edition of Shutterbug, I tried to include a shot with them wearing a corset for each shoot I did as well.
As the series is finally finishing at the end of the month, I want to keep it going with this portrait of Amber Nicholson who I photographed six times, mostly for lighting reviews for Shutterbug. And yes, one of the images from the corset portion of my shoots with Amber actually appeared in the magazine! At this point I don’t remember if it was one of the ones that are featured today, though.
Some models project a sexy vibe and this shows in the outfits they wear and the poses they come up with, while others have their own girl-next-door charm style, like Amber and that’s what shows in these photographs.
How I Made this Portrait: The featured image was from our first shoot together and she gradually became more relaxed in the other—we did six—shoots we did together. In this case, I photographed Amber for a Shutterbug lighting equipment review when testing Rimelite’s monolights, which at the time were distributed in the US by Dynalite. Before deciding to do a high key/low key set I used a collapsible background (see above right) that didn’t work. That shot shows where I placed a Rimelite Fame 200 monolight for the final image. The other monolight, a Fame 400 with Grand softbox mounted (out of the frame) is at camera left and was next to me.
A slight change in posing—moving the subjects hands from her side and switch from high key low key by using a black Westcott Scrim Jim as a background. The camera was an EOS 1D Mark II N with EF 85mm lens with an exposure of 1/80 second at f/9 and ISO 200. A black and white version of the featured photograph was published in the magazine—I think.
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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 $33.68, as I write this. Used copies start at twenty-three bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is only $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.