Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Everyone, no matter her or his stage in life, has the right to feel beautiful.”― Dita Von Teese
If you’re interested in glamour photography you should follow Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) on Instagram because of the inspirations her posts will provide. Every Monday one of her fan sites publishes glamour portraits a La Teese wearing corsets, so I thought I would give Corset Monday a try here.
Once upon a time in every shoot I did, I tried to photograph models wearing a corset This included lighting equipment reviews for the former print edition of Shutterbug. Unfortunately, the editor and managing editor chose never to feature any of these images. And since they wouldn’t let you see the images, I’m going to try to publish them until…who knows when. Some of these models that you will see in this series have either never appeared on this blog or may be under represented for many reasons, including how few shoots that I did with them.
How I Made this portrait: Let’s keep the series going with this portrait of Bella Fire, who proves that sexiness doesn’t have an age limit. Bella is a professor of mathematics who also finds it fulfilling to perform burlesque as well as posing for lucky photographers like myself. Bella worked with me for three shoots—when this image was made—until personal financial difficulties made it impossible for me to cover her transportation costs; it was more than a 160-mile round trip from her home to get to Daisy Hill. I am glad that we had these shoots together and would like to do more shoots with her.
This portrait of Bella in a sexy mood in the process or ripping off her corset was based on one of my favorite posing directions: I tell the models to act like they are ripping their clothes off and she took me literally at my word! The portrait was made in my home studio. with a DigiBee DB800 with a 48-inch Plume Ltd. hexagonal Wafer softbox attached as the main light and placed at camera right. Another DigiBee DB800 with a 18-OMNI Reflector attached, softened by a triple-layer Diffusion Sock is located at camera left and slightly behind Bella. 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/13 and ISO 200. The brightly colored Colorsmack background was from Silverlake Photo.
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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 $33.61, as I write this. Used copies start at the hard-to-beat price price starting around nine bucks with the Kindle version available at $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.