Photographing Memorable Models Again

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Last year I created a series of #ThrowbackThursday posts about some of the incredible models that I’ve worked with over the years. This year during January I’ve decided to feature a few more of the models with whom I’ve had memorable shoots.

Over the years I’ve posted photographs of different models demonstrating various photography, portrait lighting and software techniques but whenever certain models are featured on this blog or Instagram (kindly follow me @joefarace) I get nostalgic about the experience. Each of these models share a few interesting similarities, with their most notable being I haven’t photographed any of them in a long time. Not that I don’t want to but, as in the case of Ahloora aka Lori who is today’s featured model, geography gets in the way. Unlike my former home, Daisy Hill is more than 100 miles from where she lives and a 200-mile round trip may be a bit much for a TF shoot for some models.

Regular readers of the blog may be seeing some of these models for the first time and that’s my intention because another thing they have in common was how much they helped improve my photography. These women inspired me with their supportive personalities and innovative posing as well as the concepts and idea they contributed that made the shoots we did together better. I always hope, maybe against hope, that I will get a chance to work with them again sometime in the future.

Lori is a strong confident woman who had the sweetest, kindest personality of any model I’ve ever had the please to photograph. Like most figure models she was great to work with. It has been my contention that figure models make the best glamour photography models for lots of reasons including their ability to refine a pose as well as hold it when you find that one perfect shot using my “shoot through the pose” technique. And they’re usually comfortable wearing little if any clothes.

How I Made this Portrait: The portrait at right was made mostly for fun but may have been made for the Lori’s portfolio. It was shot in the dining room of my former home using the available light coming through a window in the back door. A 32-inch 5-in-1 collapsible reflector was placed at camera left as fill. One of the first poses I try as part of any warm up is the “folded arms” pose and because everyone does this differently, I’ve found that it’s a good place to start. This was the initial pose Lori threw at me and we explored it using my “shoot though a pose” method.

The camera was a Canon EOS 30D with my go-to lens for available light photography—the EF 85mm f/1.8 USM. The portrait was made using a exposure of 1/125 sec at f/2.2 and ISO 320, with a plus one-third stop exposure compensation. The image was originally captured in direct monochrome mode during on of the more unfortunate phases I was going through before realizing that RAW+JPEG was, as The Mandolorian says, the way. So I decided to colorize it using the (no longer free) Palette.fm that uses an AI to automatically and colorize black-and-white photos.