My Sunday Series on Outdoor Portraits remains on hiatus as I consider changing this day’s theme to Available Light Portraiture, which is what today’s post is about. This post also takes a look at one of the models who hasn’t appeared all that often, Lori aka Ahloora.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art” — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Over the years I’ve posted photographs of many different models to demonstrate various photography and portrait lighting techniques but whenever certain models are featured on this blog or Instagram (kindly follow me @joefarace,) I get nostalgic about the experience. Each of these models share a few interesting similarities, with their most notable being I haven’t photographed many of them in a while. Not that I don’t want to but, as in the case of Lori aka Ahloora, today’s featured model, geography gets in the way. Unlike my former home, Daisy Hill is more than 100 miles from where she lives and a 200-mile round trip may be a bit much for a TF shoot for some models,
Regular readers of the blog may be seeing some of the models for the first time in this and forthcoming posts in this series and that’s my intention because another thing they have in common was how much they helped improve my photography. These women inspired me with their supportive personalities and innovative posing as well as the concepts and ideas they contributed that made the shoots we did together better. I always hope, maybe against hope, that I will get a chance to work with them again sometime in the future.
How I Made this Portrait: Lori is a strong confident woman who had the sweetest, kindest personality of any model I’ve ever had the pleasure to photograph. She is a artist’s model model and like most figure models she was great to work with. It has been my contention that figure models make the best glamour photography models for lots of reasons including their ability to refine a pose as well as hold it when you find that one perfect shot.
The portrait at right was made for the Lori’s portfolio; for me it was for the fun of working with a model, who previously I had only photographed at group shoots. It was shot in the dining room of my former home using the available light coming through a window in the back door. A 32-inch (81cm ) collapsible reflector was placed at camera left as fill. One of the first poses I try as part of any warm up is the “folded arms” pose and because everyone does this differently, I’ve found that it’s a good place to start. This was the initial pose Lori threw at me and we explored it using my “shoot through the pose” method.The camera was a Canon EOS 30D with my go-to lens for available light photography at the time, the EF 85mm f/1.8 USM. The portrait was made with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/2.2 and ISO 320, with a plus one-third stop exposure compensation.
Colorize it
The portrait (at left) was originally captured in direct monochrome mode during one of the more unfortunate phases that I was going through before realizing that RAW+JPEG was, as The Mandolorian says, the way. So I decided to colorize it using the (formerly free) Web tool called Palette.fm that uses AI to automatically and somewhat convincingly colorize black-and-white photographs as I did with this portrait of the amazing Tia Stoneman.
Palette is good but it’s not perfect and the colorization is often uneven. For the few times I’ve used it, I almost always have to slightly correct the skin tones. They’re usually close but are not perfect. In this. and all my previous efforts, I used PictoColor’s iCorrect Portrait plug-in to make slight but critical adjustments to the portrait’s skin tones. An alternative is to use the Remove Correct Cast filter that’s part of Color Efex but that’s not perfect either. All of this verklempt is why, these days more often than not, I’ll shoot portraits in color (RAW+JPEG) and then convert them to monochrome later using Silver Efex
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($3.50), click here. And if you do, thank you very much.
If you’ want to learn how I shoot available light glamour and boudoir portraits, please pick up a copy of Available Light Glamour Photography which is available new from Amazon.com for $29.95 or used starting around twenty-two bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is $28.45 for those preferring a digital format.