It’s Your First Glamour Shoot, What’s Next?

In my post It’s Your First Glamour Shoot. What’s Happens Now? I talked about the logistics and preliminary steps you might go through during your first glamour shoot. But what happens after when you go go into your home studio or whatever location you’ve set aside for the shoot?

Getting Started in Glamour Photography

Here’s a few tips: There is no one way, no “my way or the highway” approach to photographing glamour models. If you expect to produce creative images, communicating with your models is the single most important aspect of making these kinds of photographs. Maybe that’s why the first question photographers ask me about working with glamour models is how to talk to them. They want to know the best way to communicate so models will pose comfortably and with assurance.

Let me explain: I once did a shoot working alongside two famous glamour photographers and was struck by the differences between how each of them worked with the model. One guy talked to her before starting and after they began shooting he never said another word. He’d already told her what he wanted her to do and every time he made an exposure it was her signal to move to the next pose that they had pre-planned. The other photographer was a deliberate shooter who, during the shoot, gave the model specific directions to the quarter-of-an-inch pinkie pose placement (say that fast three times) and would not make any image until he thought his composition and her pose was perfect.

Me? Depending on their comfort zone, I talk to every model differently. I think it’s our job as glamour photographers to find the best way of working with each model in a way that makes her the most comfortable. Sometimes I’m a goofball and other times, depending on the specific model’s experience level, I’m quiet and just shoot. You can get just a hint at what my working style is like by looking at my 18+ YouTube video, Behind the Scenes at a Model Shoot. The one thing you’ll notice is that when I make what I think is a great shot, I show it to the model. This kind of feedback is essential in communicating and motivating a model to work with you to create even better images.

Glamour photography is collaborative. You need to meld the best of your talents and the best of hers to form a synergy that makes the sum greater than the parts. The most important thing to remember during the entire process is to treat models with the highest ethical and professional standards. It will make your photographs better and your legal bills non-existent.

How I Made this Portrait: Sometimes a photographer and model just click—as Erin and I did on this day—but other times it takes a few shoots, with each one getting gradually better as you each learn to communicate and become comfortable working together. In looking back at the 212 images that Erin and I made together during our first shoot, I was amazed at how many really good and even how great many of these images were.

I photographed Erin in my 11×15-foot home studio. The main light.was a Paul C. Buff DigiBee DB800 with Plume Ltd Wafer softbox attached and placed at camera right. An Alien Bee B800 with 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box was at camera left with another DigiBee with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella placed in the back far left corner of the studio. She was photographed against a black Savage Infinity vinyl backdrop hung from my JTL background stands. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 45mm.) The exposure was 1/125 sec at f/8 and ISO 200.

Note for my Patreon Subscribers. After looking at all the images in this series , I noticed that I could make a nice Bonus post with them for one of my uncensored Password Protected posts. If you are interested in seeing some of the other images from this session, click CONTACT and let me know. If you are not yet a Patreon subscriber—it’s surprisingly inexpensive—details on how to sign up can be found here.