Today’s Post by Joe Farace
You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.—Rick Nelson from Garden Party.
There’s a wonderful Peanuts comic strip where Charlie Brown talks to Psychiatrist Lucy who tells him all about the different kinds of fears that he might be afflicted with. When she finally gets to Panophobia, the fear of everything, he says “That’s it!” But what about a fear of being photographed? I believe that it’s real. Copophobia, scoptophobia, or ophthalmophobia are anxiety disorders that are characterized by a fear of being seen or stared at by others, as in a photograph.
I recently ran into this phenomenon when doing a test shoot with a potential model who told me, she “didn’t like the way her face looks” when she’s photographed. Truth was she had a lovely face and I thought she would be a great model.
I suggested we do a series of head shots and periodically we would stop and let her take a look at the photographs we just made. After the first ten headshots, she took a look at the images on the camera’s LCD screen and didn’t like any of them. I liked one so much that I posted it on an on-line modeling forum and received lots of compliments from both models and photographers. I then shot ten more head shots, than ten more but she never liked any of them. So we called it a day and I wished her well. I later saw some images she did from a photo shoot with another photographer and she posted on-line. In all of these images her face was very small within the frame. Yet, I repeat she was a lovely looking and sweet person.
How I made this Portrait: I am a big believer in shooting a series of warm up photos during the first session with a new model. And depending on the model, one of the best ways to do that is to make a series of headshots as I did with Amy, today’s featured model, before we moved on—after she was more comfortable in the studio—to creating other images where she played an active part in producing many of the scenarios that we photographed. The session was a lot of fun for both of us.
This portrait was shot using a single monolight with a 40-inch white umbrella mounted in shoot-through mode that was placed at camera left with a 32-inch reflector at camera right being used for fill. A Savage 5 x 7-foot Infinity grey vinyl background was hung on my JTL background stands. Camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 45mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/9 and ISO 200.
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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 $34.95, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price around nine bucks and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.