Today’s Post by Joe Farace
On March 27th National Joe Day encourages everyone to enjoy a cup of joe with all of your friends that are named Joe, Jo, Joey, Joseph, and Josephine. While you’re at it, don’t forget Joette, Joella, Jody, Johanna, Jodie, Dolly Parton’s Jolene or any other variant of the name Joe. And Joe made the below photograph.
I know my curves are sexy and I want everyone else to know that theirs are too. There is no reason to hide and every reason to flaunt.—Ashley Graham
If you’re interested in glamour photography you might want to follow the Instagram feed of Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) because she posts inspirational images. Each Monday one of her Instagram fan sites posts a series of glamour portraits a her wearing a corset and that’s where I came up with the idea of #corsetmonday.
For years, I’ve been photographing models in my studio or wherever wearing corsets and that extended to all of the lighting equipment reviews I wrote for the former print edition of Shutterbug. To the best of my recollection, the editor, managing editor and art director never allowed any of these photographs to be published in the magazine.
How I Made this Portrait: One of my guiding principles in photographing models is that I want to make them comfortable during the shoot. Some models project a sexy vibe and this shows in the outfits they choose to wear and the poses they come up with, while others have their own style.
I recently was fortunate to photograph Scarlet Ana for both the Corset Monday series and the upcoming #seethrough series that I previewed here. The lighting setup for this portrait consisted of two Paul C Buff DigiBee DB800’s monolights and one Alien Bee B800 monolight. One DigiBee DB800 was placed at camera right and was fairly close to Scarlet. It had a 37x27x12inch Plume Ltd. Wafer soft box attached. An Alien Bee B800 with an 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box mounted was located at camera left. Another DigiBee DB800 with a Paul C Buff 18-OMNI Reflector attached, softened by a triple-layer Diffusion Sock, was located at camera left and placed neat the back corner of my home studio.
The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 23mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/11 and ISO 200. The background was a hand painted Carbonite muslin from Silverlake Photo.
MODELS WANTED: With #corsetmonday coming to an end soon, I want to replace it with a #seethrough series. To do that I’m looking for women who are interested in posing in see-through clothing or lingerie. After signing a simple model release, they will receive their choice of a CD or flash drive containing all the approx 200 photographs we’ll make—to take with her on the day of the shoot. The model will also receive full rights to use the images however they like. If you’re interested, click CONTACT and let’s talk.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), 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 with new copies available from Amazon for $33.24, as I write this. Used copies start at around twenty-three bucks and the Kindle version is only $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.