Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It might take just as much effort to fit in as it does to stand out, because you’re standing up for yourself. It’s those who take a risk and take chances who achieve greatness. Those who play it safe never can.”― Dita Von Teese
I recently did a Google search for “glamour photography” and it produced 1,680,000,000 results! So there’s a good chance that you might be interested in this genre. If so, you might want to follow Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) on Instagram because of the inspiration her images provide. On Mondays one of her IG fan sites publishes glamour portraits her wearing corsets, so last year, I decided to give #corsetmonday a try.
There was a time in my glamour photography journey when I tried to photograph every model wearing a corset during shoots that we had, including lighting equipment I wrote for the former print edition of Shutterbug. The editorial staff never published a single one of these photographs. Since they wouldn’t let you see any of these images, I want to publish them as long as this series runs.
Some of the models featured in this series may be under represented on this blog while, Others, like today’s featured model—Pam Simpson— may be more familiar to readers of this blog. One of the best models I ever found through a modeling website was Pam Simpson. She is beautiful, versatile and open to creative suggestions.You’ve seen her many, many times because I photographed her for one of the longest periods of time, perhaps the longest, of any model I’ve so far been lucky enough to work with.
How I Made this Portrait: Today’s image is from our second portrait session together. And yes, she’s holding a whip. I photographed this homage to the 1964 film Kitten with a Whip with Pam standing alongside the french doors that open into my home’s guest bedroom using two 320 Watt-second monolights. The camera position is on the loft area that’s just outside the bedroom. One of the monolights was located on the loft directly behind my camera position mounted with a Paul C Buff white 51-inch PLM umbrella. A second monolight with a standard reflector attached was placed inside the guest room, behind Pam and at camera left giving her just the touch of a rim light.
The camera used was a EOS 5D Mark I with a EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens at 53mm. The original exposure was 1/100 sec at f/13 and ISO 200. That turned out to be slightly underexposed. I changed that in later shots to 1/100 sec at f/10 and ISO 200 but as Murphy’s or was it Farace’s Law often states, “…but I liked her pose and expression on this shot.” I corrected this portrait using my Underexposed Portrait Technique and then used Photoshop’s Transform>Skew command to straighten out the door edges. My OCD made me do it. My normal regime of retouching and enhancement tools was used to complete the images.
Postscript; I have a few different images of Pam wearing corsets and maybe Ill be featuring more of them in the weeks to come. OK, for sure…
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($3.50), please click here. And if you do, thanks so much.
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. New books are available from Amazon for $23.82 with used copies, for some reason, starting around that same price as I write this. Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.