My Sunday Series on Outdoor Portraits remains remains on hiatus as I consider changing this day’s theme to Available Light Portraiture, which is what today’s post, featuring Liz, is somewhat about.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A woman’s body is beautiful and should be shown off and celebrated. I like to accentuate the feminine form, so I’m a big fan of corsets.—Haley Bennett
If you’re interested in glamour photography you might want to follow the Instagram feed of Dita Von Teese (@ditavonteese) because she posts inspirational images. Each Monday one of her Instagram fan sites publishes a series of glamour portraits of her wearing a corset, which initially inspired me to give the #corsetmonday a try,
What to Wear?
When making wardrobe suggestion to glamour models I often suggest corsets and try to include a series of shots of the model wearing them in our sessions. I even created these kinds of images when writing and shooting lighting equipment reviews for the former print edition of Shutterbug. Some of the models that I photographed for this series never appeared in print, including today’s feature image for reasons…
Liz was an aspiring model who was sent to me when I had a working relationship with a local modeling agency and while that is no longer a viable option for me, it was great while it lasted. Like many of the models I photographed,during this time, I would like to photograph her today because I think we could create some great looking images together with her. Every now and then I hear from some of the models who I photographed 10, 15 and even 20 years ago and while I’m always glad to hear from them, more often than not they now are living out-of-state.
How I Made this Portrait: Liz and I had three shoots together before she decided to change career directions. Every shoot that Liz and I did together was done on location, sometimes in my home, as was the case for today’s featured image. One I did a collaborative shoot* with her and the amazing Dawn Clifford at Dawn’s home in Northern Colorado.
For this portrait, I photographed Liz in the house I lived in before moving to Daisy Hill and had access to a home studio. She was photographed in the living room using only available light from the narrow South-facing windows behind her and the North-facing, second floor windows that are behind my camera. The camera used was a Canon EOS 50D with EF 85mm f/1.8 lens and exposure of 1/15 sec at f/2 and ISO 800, which was, at least, one-stop underexposed.
I used Photoshop’s Ruler tool and the Rotate command to straighten out the edges of the fireplace behind her. My OCD made me do it. Next, I corrected this portrait using my Underexposed Portrait Technique. After correcting for the underexposure, Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) was applied using Dfine and my normal regime of retouching and enhancement tools was used to complete the images. This was followed with layering the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex to produce the final image you see here.
*Note for my Patreon Subscribers. After looking at all of the images that I made in this and other series with Liz, I realized I could produce a Bonus post for one of my uncensored Password Protected posts using images of her. If you’re interested in seeing some of the other images from these sessions in that kind of a post, 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.