When I mentioned I couldn’t come up with a new theme for Tuesdays, my wife suggested “Tricky Tuesday” as a way to share some of the tricks, tips and techniques that I’ve used over the years when shooting glamour images in the studio. This Tuesday’s post features the gorgeous and sexy Erin Valakari aka Vala the Artist.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Believe you can and you’re halfway there. —Theodore Roosevelt
Each Tuesday I try to offer a trick or tip for making your next model shoot easier and maybe even fun while creating great looking portraits at the same time. In a previous post, I wrote, “If you’re wondering how someone who was originally an architectural and product photographer came to wander down this path, it will be the subject of a future post.” This just might be that post.
How I got started in glamour photography?
The path to my becoming interested in glamour photography was an indirect route and it’s worth mentioning only because it might also describe you. When Mary and I opened our studio, we divided the workload based on the kind of photography we were each best at producing: In her case, she photographed people while I photographed products but mostly architecture. Because of scheduling conflicts sometimes I would shoot a few business portraits but people were really Mary’s forté.
I always admired and respected the work of Peter Gowland and late in his life,he and I struck up a long-distance friendship. My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography, is dedicated to Peter and Alice Gowland, although sadly it was published after he passed away. During the 1980’s, I began avidly collecting and reading Gowland’s glamour photography books. Then in the late 1990’s when looking at some of the new glamour images that were appearing on the Web, notably on Dave Halls Glamour Models forum, I became interested in working in the genre.
How I Made this Portrait: For this portrait of Erin Valakari, the backdrop was a painted muslin from Silverlake Photo Accessories hanging from JTL background stands. Lighting was from a single Paul C Buff DigiBee 800 with a Plume Wafer HexOval 100 (37.5 x 27.5 by 12 inches deep) attached and placed at camera right with a 32-inch reflector located at camera left. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens at 78mm and an exposure of 1/80 sec and f/8 and ISO 200.
It was shot with my now-standard RAW+JPEG format, with copies of the JPEGs given to the model for her use and the RAW files used to create images for this blog and other uses. The RAW file was retouched with Imagenomic’s Portraiture, then lightly tweaked using Vivenza and Color Efex to produce the image you see here.
Learning a Lesson
When Mary and I sold our studio because of my health problems, we also sold all the lighting equipment, so I had to start building a lighting kit from scratch because I honestly believed that “I wasn’t ever going to photograph people.”
That’s when I learned you can never say “never” or “ever” and started making glamour images with little or no lighting equipment. If you’re interested in that topic, you can check out this post or poke around this blog for posts on that subject. I pitched a couple of book publishers on the topic of “No Frills Glamour Photography” and while I came close to it with Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography it wasn’t quite the same because of the exigencies of the book publishing world.
You may be interested in trying boudoir photography but think it’s difficult and that you need lots of expensive equipment but getting started is less difficult than you think. If you’ve been interested in photography for a while and are familiar with the basics including focus, composition and exposure, you’re be ready to make your first glamour photograph.
For more information about on location portrait photography, please check out the Holiday Edition of the Pixels, Grain and Cookies podcast for a behind-the-scenes look at my friend Barry Staver‘s shoots for People magazine that includes him photographing gorilla twins. For several months, I wrote a Sunday Series of posts about Outdoor Portraiture; you can find these posts using this blog’s Search function (Magnifying Glass icon.)