Outdoor Portraiture with My First Muse

My Sunday series on outdoor portraiture continues today with a portrait of my first muse, Tia Stoneman. She is a talented model who I photographed for many years after today’s featured image was made.

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

A muse is defined as a “woman, or a force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.”

Tia Stoneman was my first real muse. As with a more than a few of the other models who featured in this series, working with Tia goes back to a meeting at a group model shoot. There was a (wonderful) time when Dawn Clifford and her husband John Clifford hosted events at their home under the auspices of the Colorado Artists, Models and Photographer’s group. I didn’t know how the Cliffords found models to participate in these shoots, I always assumed they put out some kind of Casting Call on the Internet and they were quite successful in finding models. often attracting models from as far away as North Platte, Nebraska.

How I Made this Portrait: I photographed Tia outdoors on a park-style bench that’s located in front of the Clifford’s home. Her make up and overall style is a lot different from what we would do later but I did photograph her for my “Corset” series and you can see images from that shoot here and here. For this image I used my Canon EOS-1D Mark II N—I loved that camera—and the EF 135mm f/2,8 SF lens with no soft focus setting selected. The available light exposure was 1/500 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 500.

To create the finished image, I started by cropping the image into a 5×7 aspect ratio from the original JPEG file’s 3:2 ratio. Why? The best in-camera cropped image from this series was not sharp. Camera movement? So I picked an image where I liked her expression then cropped the photograph to get it closer to —but not quite—my preferred cropping. Next I applied the Sunshine filter from Color Efex to wrap up my edit.

The Model

Tia Stoneman has appeared on this site many, many times. Like other models Ive photographed, that was her professional name being a combination of part of her real name and her grandmother’s last name. For all the numerous times we worked together and all the times I’ve featured her on this blog—I don’t know how many—I have never told the story of how we met. Until now…

Tia was an actress and she brought that chameleon-like quality to each and every one of out shoots, as you can see by clicking posts featuring her in the “Related” section at the bottom of this post. This versatility was true whether we were working outdoors or in the little makeshift studio area in the basement of our former home. Every shoot with her was a delight. What I didn’t know until looking through my image archives was that Mary had photographed her at another group model shoot a year before I met Tia. I must have been seriously distracted not to have noticed or even photographed her at that time. What I also didn’t also realize was that this featured image was from the second time I photographed her at one of the Clifford’s group model shoots. The images I made at that first shoot were at best unremarkable but there were some that would make a nice desktop portrait for her husband. But…during this particular shoot, I also made the “biker chick” shot of her, where unbeknownst to me, she was several month’s pregnant.

We clicked and started working almost immediately after that second group shoot. As you can see by the linked posts, I photographed her while she was pregnant, after she had her first child, and even did a shoot with her and the baby. I continued working with her for about three years until she moved to the Four Corners area of Colorado. I would love to photograph her today.