Photographing a Goth Model Outsoors

My Sunday series on outdoor portraiture continues today with a portrait of Jovanna, who is not a model and yet she is someone I photographed during a group model shoot in Phoenix. Arizona. I’ll explain how that all worked out…

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

As a teenager I went all Goth, but I wasn’t mopey enough. I would pretend to be, but I’d end up making people laugh.—Melissa McCarthy

Black and white is a wonderful media for making portraits because the lack of color simplifies the image, causing you to focus on the real subject of the photograph instead of their clothing or surroundings.

Back in the not-so-old days the only way to make a black and white photograph was by shooting black and white film. Digital shooters can have it both ways. Most digital cameras give you a choice of shooting in color or black and white—even at the same time—or you can capture the portrait as a color image and convert it  to monochrome later, as I did with this portrait, using techniques in Adobe Photoshop or third-party plug-ins.

My Portraiture Journey

It may surprise some of you but I didn’t start out as a people photographer. As I mentioned in my book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography, when Mary and I opened our studio, we divided the workload based on the types of images our clients wanted. It worked out so that she photographed people and I photographed things, mostly architecture and products. Every now and then because of her scheduling and availability I would shoot a few business portraits or head shots but people were always Mary’s game.

Then, for health reasons, I took an extended sabbatical from the studio’s day-to-day operations. As I recovered, my photographic direction began to change after seeing some of the new glamour photography that was appearing on the Internet, especially on the late Dave Hall’s glamour model photography forum. That’s when I became interested in photographing people. Along the way, I wrote a book called Part-Time Glamour Photography: Full-Time Income, with used copies available from Amazon at affordable prices, as I write this.

Here’s what I discovered when it came to photographing glamour models. All of the ingredients for making portraits of women are easy to find: All you need a subject, a camera and some kind of lighting, even (mostly) daylight as I used in this portrait.

How I made this portrait: This portrait of Jovanna was made at a group model shoot in Arizona. Let me clear up two important points: First, this portrait was made in an outdoor movie set at a movie studio in Phoenix and is not a real graveyard. I know some people like to photograph models, especially Goth style, in real graveyards but I am not comfortable doing that for many reasons. Second. Jovanna was not a model who was part of the shoot. She’s really a Goth who was one of the make-up artists working at the event. For some reason, at both of the group model shoots that were sponsored by Dave Hall that I attended, I ended up having private shoots with one of the make-up artists. I don’t know why this was but it happened at both shoots that I attended. Now about the session itself…

To photograph Jovanna in her full Goth regalia, I used a 6.3-megapixel Canon EOS 10D with an EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens set at 50mm. The exposure was 1/200 sec at f/9 and ISO 200 with a minus one-third stop exposure compensation. A Canon 550EX speedlite was used as fill with a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce diffuser attached to soften the light. The EOS 10D has a flash sync speed of 1/200 second. The image (above right) was converted to Black and White using Silver Efex because I thought it might suit the portrait’s mood. The Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex was added just because I wanted to use it.

You can see the original color version, as captured, at left. Let me know which version you like best and why. There’s a prize for the best response. (My standard contest rules apply.)