So remember, every picture tells a story, don’t it…—Rod Stewart, his third studio album released on 28 May 1971, by Mercury Records.
“Every picture tells a story. But sometimes it’s hard to know what story is actually being told.” ― Beautiful World
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear,,, oops wrong post.
I’m not as big a fan of Mr, Stewart’s music as my wife but that quote of Ms. . It’s full of photographs, as one would suspect given the book’s title, of scantily —and some less that scantily— clad models that you might be able to see examples of in one of my Password Protected posts. (You can read about how to access these posts in my most recent blog post on the topic.)
You may or may not be surprised to learn, given the kind of posts that I’ve previously written on this subject, that there were many discussions with one of the Associate Editors assigned to that book about some of the images I submitted and she hated—except this one. Unlike some of the others, she said this image was “glamorous.” I think this image is a nice portrait but consider it to be a glamour photograph only in the broadest definition. The photograph was ultimately deleted, so it’s not in the published book and you see it here for the first time.
How I Made This Photograph
The New England Camera Club Council (NECCC) is a nonprofit umbrella group of a large number of camera clubs in New England, including Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. It was founded in 1937, incorporated in 1963. For many years it held one of the best, maybe THE best, photographic conferences in the United States. It was held on the beautiful campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Twice I was invited to be a speaker at the conference and two different times I attended just as a student and each time it was one of the most fantastic events I ever participated in either as a teacher or student. Since the pandemic, the event has been held virtually but if it ever comes back as a live conference, I urge each and every one of you to attend.
Typically during the event there would typically be group model shoots around the picturesque campus and over the years I participated in several of them, When I was a teacher I typically just brought a point-and-shoot camera, which is how I made this photograph. When I’m a teacher at an event I don’t like to take time away from my students, but I have attended many shoots, including press events, where the instructor hogged all the shots while ignoring their students. As the man once said, “Homey don’t play that.”
It’s been a while since I participated in the group model shoot where I made this portrait, in fact she and I may have left the group and gone off to work together privately, as often happens with me when I develop a report with certain models. The camera used was a Nikon F2SB, which used the DP-3 finder that was available from 1976 to 1977. The DP-3 introduced three innovations: It used a silicon photodiode light meter for faster and more accurate light readings, a five-stage center-the-LED exposure control system using +/o/− LEDs, and an eyepiece blind. The lens used was the legendary 105mm f/2.5 lens. Exposure was unrecorded but perhaps shot wide open due to the bokeh. Film was Kodak Tr-X which was later scanned onto Photo CD at Werner’s Camera in Denver..
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My film based book, Part-time Glamour Photography – Full-time Income, is mostly about the business of glamour photography and although some might consider it “old,” it remains one of my favorite books. The book does contain some good shooting tips, such as my use of what I now call my warm up technique, with detailed photographs filling a full page of the 9.5 x 11.25-inch book. New copes are available from Amazon for $28.99 with used copies starting around three bucks, as I write this.