Today is the first day of winter and is the Winter Solstice. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the Earth is tilted as far away from the sun as it will be all year. It’s also the shortest day and longest night of the year. In 2025, the Solstice occurs at 9:03 AM MST here on Daisy Hill.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A smile is the light in your window that tells others that there is a caring, sharing person inside”—Denis Waitley
The specific lens that I choose for making glamour photograph is usually determined by whether I’m shooting in my home studio or on location. “On location,” to me, could mean outdoors or indoors at places in and around my home. Today’s featured image, for example, was made in my former home’s kitchen that had a large bay window.
Light and Space
One of Farace’s Law’s is that there’s never enough space indoors to shoot a portrait and I often find myself pressed up against a wall opposite the subject when shooting these kinds of images. This type of situation translates into having to use shorter focal length lenses than I might normally prefer but that doesn’t mean you can’t make great portraits no matter what lens you have available.
A corollary to that particular Law is that there is also never enough light to shoot indoors. You can always use speedlights as I did for a calendar shoot* in a fire truck factory and I’ll occasionally do that to add some fill light when making glamour portraiture as well as for shooting situations in and around my home. Glamour, to me, is all about soft light and there’s nothing softer than window light. The only problem is that there isn’t always the proper amount of light available—there’s that corollary again.
Many times, the light that is available suggests using prime, fast lenses, such as 85 or 135mm lenses—if you have them—but don’t discount the so-called “normal” 50mm lens. Even an inexpensive normal lens can be used to make great shots, although for some situations where there is enough light, you cant beat the flexibility of a zoom lens like the one I used for today’s portrait.
How I made this portrait: The above photograph of Dusty was made in the North-facing bay window of my former home’s kitchen using a Canon EOS 10D and a EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens at 63mm. The exposure was 1/200 sec at f/4.0 and ISO 400 with a 550EX speedlite with a Sto-fen Omni diffuser attached used as fill. As far as posing was concerned, I typically watch how a model moves and then put them in a pose that’s close to what they naturally do. In this case, the window sill is not that wide, so I asked Dusty to try to sit in the space between two sections of the window and she put her left leg onto the sill, which I thought looked great. Next I suggested minor tweaks in the position of her arms and head to produce the image you see. The final photograph was slightly cropped using a 4:3 aspect ratio to tighten the framing and put more emphasis on the subject For many years I avoided cropping images but now find myself cropping portraits, if only slightly, to increase immediacy and impact. The Vignette Blur filter from Color Efex was used to soften the image’s edges.
Tip: As I’ve mentioned before when writing about my concept of “shooting though a pose” this was not the first exposure I made of this pose and was the tenth shot of ten I made of this sequence.
You can find more posing tips on this blog by using the Search function box in the upper right-hand corner or for something more lasting, you can pick up a copy of my book, Posing for Portrait and Glamour Photography that’s available on Amazon, new or used, at affordable prices.
Note for my Patreon Subscribers. As a member of the second and third tier of my Patreon, members can see uncensored images of Dusty from this session and the referenced fire truck factory calendar shoot in one of my Password Protected posts. If you are interested in seeing some of these photographs, click CONTACT and let me know. If you are not currently a Patreon subscriber—it’s surprisingly inexpensive—details on how to sign up can be found here.