Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I’ve always loved the idea of not being what people expect me to be. —Dita Von Teese
If you’re interested in glamour photography you may want to follow the Instagram feed of Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) because she’s always posting interesting images. Each Monday one of her fan sites publishes a series of glamour portraits of her wearing a corset, so I thought I would give it a try here—at least for the time remaining. After Memorial Day, the #seethrough series takes over on Mondays.
When I was writing lighting equipment reviews for the former print edition of Shutterbug, I tried to include photographs of models wearing a corset but, to the best of my knowledge, the magazine never published any of these images. They never told me why but based on my experience with book an magazine publishers, one could guess. Since these people wouldn’t let you see any of these images, I’m going to continue to publish a some of them in the few remaining #CorsetMonday posts.
Some of the models featured in this series have either never appeared on this blog or may be under represented depending on how many shoots that I did with them. I
What’s in a name? Maybe you remember Kellie Alexander? She was a beautiful, young model whose sexy and zaftig appearance created shock waves with the publishers and editors who were reviewing the photographs—that I shot—for an article she appeared in. It is telling that all the magazines that refused to run these image are defunct, except one that lives on as a shadow-of-itself website, You can read the entire saga by clicking on Kellie’s name at the beginning of this paragraph.
Enter Kelly Alexander, another young model who I only got to photograph twice. The featured image is from our first shoot together. During our second shoot, one of the sessions that included her posing• with Erin Valakari. Kelly is a sweet wonderful young woman and like some of the other models you’ve seen in this series, I’m hoping to get to photograph her again at some time in the future.
How I made this portrait: This particular session, like the second one, was shot for Kelly’s on-line portfolio. I photographed her in my 11×15 home studio using a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 32mm.) Lighting was from a single Paul C Buff DigiBee with a Plume Wafer softbox attached and placed at camera right with a 32-inch Westcott reflector located at camera left. Exposure was 1/125 sec at f/9 and ISO 200. Background was a hand-painted Carbonite muslin background from Silverlake Photo Accessories.
*Postscript: Some of the images from the session with Kelly and Erin would cause spontaneous combustion in the offices of all the nanny software’s office around the word, so you will never see them here. I also, regretfully, cannot show you more portraits of Kelly by herself from this same session. I hope someday I’ll have access to an on-line forum where I can display some of those kinds of photographs. Right now, I’m ltalking to my Webmaster about creating one in 2023.
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 $33.27 with used copies, for some reason, starting around ttwenty-three bucks. Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.