Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“I think if you spend all your time looking for happiness, it will make you miserable.”—Salvatore “Sam” Farace, or maybe I just made that up.
In 2001, the Society of Happy People created Hunt for Happiness Week to encourage us to take a closer look at what we define as happiness and what it takes to achieve a satisfying level of this personal pleasure in our lives. While it’s not possible to be happy all the time, some of us come close. Sometimes natural chemical balance helps while other times, a balance of luck and blessings keep good karma flowing. Most of the time, however, happiness takes a little effort and an awareness of what true happiness looks like.
Many factors play a role in happiness and location isn’t one of them. In 2021 the United Nations published a list of the happiest nations on Earth. In North America, Canada dropped out of the top ten into 15th place. The United States ranked 14th. Finland came in as the happiest country in the world for the fifth year running.
Technology seemed to be one of the most significant factors in the United States’ waning happiness but for 2020 the ninth World Happiness Report reports that “COVID-19 has shaken, taken, and reshaped lives everywhere.”
How To Observe #HuntForHappinessWeek
- During the week, consider what brings you happiness. Exploring those areas of your life and discover where joy lies.
- Who are the people in your life that bring you happiness? Seeing them can bring you joy.
- A spiritual connection can often be essential to happiness.
- Taking care of your health and connecting to the outdoors may improves your physical well being.
- Develop community connections and social activities that broaden your horizons.
- Identify your favorite activities and pursue them—like Film Photography
How I Made this Photograph: When it comes to photography, working in my home studio makes me happy but the pandemic has crushed this happiness.I haven’t photographed in the studio for more than two years. And while film photography makes me happy, I keep thinking about the abundant happiness that would be bestowed upon me by photographing a model in my home studio—with film. Like Snow White, I keep hoping that someday my prints will come.
I’m happy when photographing a wonderfully talented and gorgeous model like Erin Valakari but sad when I realize this was from our last shoot in 2019. The lighting setup used a Paul C. Buff DigiBee DB800 with a Plume Ltd hexagonal Wafer soft box that was placed at camera right. An Alien Bee B800 with an 18-inch Paul C Buff OMNI reflector with Triple layer diffuser is at camera left while another Digibee with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella was placed in a back left corner of my studio. The background was an inexpensive muslin background that was suspended from JTL background stands.
The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a used Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 31mm) that I purchased on eBay from a camera store in Japan. The exposure was 1/125 sec at f/10 and ISO 200. Image was color balanced with PictoColor’s iCorrect Portrait plug-in, retouched using my standard retouching techniques and tweaked using the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex Pro.
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If you’d like my take on glamour photography pick up a copy of Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography. It’s full of tips, tools and techniques including information on all of the gear used to make each image as well as the exposure data for each photograph. New books are available from Amazon for $30.79 with used copies starting around nine bucks, as I write this. Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.