Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A muse is a woman or force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist. If you have a friend or maybe yourself who would like to be my muse or have questions about the concept or would like to schedule an interview about becoming my muse, please click the Contact button and let’s talk.
While the wonderfully vivacious Pamela Simpson was never officially my muse there is no doubt that during the four plus years that we worked together we produced some great-looking images.
One of the delights of working with Pam was never knowing what hair style or even what its color would be from shoot-to-shoot but at the point when today’s featured images was made in our photographic relationship she seemed to have settled on one color—blonde—with some slight variations of this style.
How I made this photo: Today’s image is from our twelfth portrait session together that was held on February 11, 2014.
Lighting for this portrait was provided by a Flashpoint battery powered monolight that was placed at camera right. The light modifier used was a 36-inch Glow Softbox Octa-R softbox. It has an octagonal shape, one of my favorites to use for portraiture because of the way it evenly spreads light. This softbox is made from a sturdy rubberized material and its front cover accepts grids and there’s a zipper cutout for a lightstand, which means it attaches via the monolight’s umbrella mount. No speed ring is required.
The main and only light was supplemented with an inexpensive ($29.90) Westcott 30-inch 5-in-1 Reflector that was placed at camera left just out of camera range. Camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 lens with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/8 and ISO 200.
The background used was a 5×7-ft Savage’s Photo Gray Infinity vinyl background that’s suspended on my old falling-apart set of JTL background stands. One of the reasons I like this background is that it’s perfect for color correcting using PictoColor’s iCorrect Portrait. Just click on the background and viola! skin tone is perfect.
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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 $31.77, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price of five bucks and the Kindle version is only $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.