Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Lingerie is my next love after clothing; I think it is what is worn underneath that really inspires a woman to feel beautiful in her clothes – that inner, secret glamour.—Alice Temperley
There are lots of advantages to shooting glamour portraits in a studio, even if it’s just a temporary set-up in your basement or garage. The biggest advantage being you have total control over the environment or as I like to paraphrase the Outer Limits voice, you can control the lighting, the background and subject.
In the studio, you don’t have to worry about wind or changeable weather conditions. But there is something about a location shoot that can’t be duplicated in the studio and that’s the location itself.
Shooting in Cancun may be too expensive for most of us but shooting in local parks is free and entry to state parks costs less than a few bucks a day. A few of my local parks even have beaches as hard as it may for you to believe considering I live in Colorado. If you find that shooting in a park, especially during the less crowded weekdays, works for you, I suggest that you get an annual pass. Many state parks have less expensive annual passes that cover all parks statewide.
When you take the time to look around, attractive and dramatic locations are all over the place. The search begins by looking for places that will accommodate to the requirements of glamour photography and the client’s comfort as well.
How I Made this Shot: I photographed Tasha on a movie set in Phoenix but the old building she’s standing in front of could, just as well have been the farmhouse at Hidden Mesa Open Space just a few miles from Daisy Hill (and where I photographed Maria Cedar.) The camera used was a Canon EOS 60D with my old favorite, the EF135mm f/2.8 SF lens (with soft focus set at zero.) While no longer available from Canon, I have seen used copies of this amazing lens on Amazon for around two hundred bucks. Available light exposure was 1/400 sec at f/5 and ISO 200. No reflectors or flash was used for fill.
The original JPEG filed (made before my current RAW+JPEG regimen) was lightly retouched; Tasha has great skin. I converted the image to monochrome by accidentally launching Exposure Software’s Exposure X4 in black and white mode and really liked the tonalities that choice created especially with the edge effects. (I know the plug-in’s currently up to X6 but that was the only version that will currently work correctly on Photoshop CS6 and the OS version I am currently running on my 5K iMac.) The converted file was then layered with the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex Pro.
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If you would like my take on glamour photography, please pick up a copy of my book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography. It’s full of tips, tools and techniques and includes information on all of the gear that used to make each image as well as the exposure data for each photograph. New books are available from Amazon for $21.98. with used copies starting at $8.90, as I write this. Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.