Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
you’ll get by—Chaplin
“Smile” is a song that’s based on the theme song that was used in the soundtrack for Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times.
Why Not Smile?
Let me tell you a story about smiles… When Mary and I owned our studio, one of our regular clients was a national telecommunications company and we had a contract to make head shots of all their new employees. This was the kind of bread and butter assignments that many photographers have and, for the most part, these shoots were uneventful, except for one time when it wasn’t.
The employee to be photographed was a female engineer who refused—she told us that up front—to smile. It was Mary’s turn to make the headshots so if anybody could coax a smile out of a person, she could. One of her techniques was—and still is—to look over a tripod-mounted camera and smile at the subject. It’s impossible not to smile back but this person wouldn’t. After looking at the proof sheet, I knew the client—the person actually paying us—would not like these photographs so we offered a re-shoot and managed to get, what might be called a “Snoopy smile” out of the engineer and that evidently satisfied the client.
No Smiles?
During one of a calendar shoot with glamour models and the client and I had an unexpected guest—the person who owned the facility where we were shooting—and he asked, a question I often get from some photographers as well: Why isn’t she smiling?
Some models, like Denise Winkleman, are the kind of women who when you point a camera at them, they give you a radiant smile. But some models don’t. Sometimes I’ll ask a glamour model to smile if I see they are not “in the zone” and need to be brought back into the session but that is a rare occurrence. This is one area where I break with one of my greatest photographic influences, the work of of the late Peter Gowland. More often than not, his models are smiling; In my own case, more often than not, they are not. That’s just my style, your style is your style. If you want your models to smile, go for it! The world needs more smiles anyway.
How I Made this Portrait: I photographed Mary giving me her best Lee Meriwether (everybody other than Batfans will have to Google that name) smile in my home studio with the EOS 1D Mark III and EF 135mm f/2.8 SF lens. The exposure in Manual mode was 1/60 at f/9 and ISO 200. Autofocus in my dimly lit studio was sluggish but no more so than my EOS 1D Mark II N. Under these same, dimly lit conditions my EOS 5D Mark I seems to lock on and focus faster.
World Smile Day
The first Friday of October is World Smile Day that was proposed by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist and was a response to his creation of the smiley face. Harvey worried that the commercialization of the symbol would lessen its impact. That symbol has been used in many different ways including clothing, comic books, coffee mugs, pins, and more. These little yellow faces are more than just a symbol, they’re a statement about the power of smiling.
World Smile Day asks us all to devote a day to smiles and spreading random acts of kindness. In most cases (see text above) if someone smiles at you, you’re bound to smile back. A smile often expresses a feeling, encouragement to someone, or serves as a greeting. There are many benefits of smiling:
- Improves your mood
- Lowers your blood pressure
- Relieves stress
- Makes for better relationships
- Boosts the immune system
- Relieves pain
- Increases life expectancy
Who wouldn’t want all those benefits? All it takes is smiling. And the more often, the better!
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