Photographing “The Femme Fatale”

by | Jan 5, 2022

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

“The mystique of the Femme Fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.”—Camille Paglia

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

Most digital cameras give you a choice of shooting color or black and white—even at the same time—or you can capture a color image and convert it later to monochrome using some of the techniques available in Adobe Photoshop. Back in the not-so-old days the only way to make a black and white photograph was by shooting black and white film. Now digital shooters can have it both ways:

As mentioned in my book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography, I didn’t start out as a people photographer. Sometimes I’d make a business portrait or headshot but people were really Mary’s game. When I took an extended sabbatical from the studio, things changed and I started making and enjoying shooting portraits like today’s featured image of Megan..

How I made this portrait: This portrait of Megan, who reminds me of Gillian Anderson, is from one of the first sessions I did with this aspiring model who was sent to me by a local modeling agency. It was shot in the office of my former home, using only window light. The portrait was made with a Canon EOS 50D with an EF 22-55mm f/4-5.6 USM lens (at 55mm) with an available light exposure of 1/50 sec at f.5.6 and ISO 400.

The first thing I did was use Dfine to minimize the noise from the slightly underexposed portrait. Then I used PhotoKit 2’s burning and dodging tools to dodge the left hand half and burn the right hand half, before applying Unsharp Mask to add some semblance of sharpness.

Next I converted the color image to monochrome with Silver Efex Pro with the Low Key preset but using the sliders to produce the look I wanted. Then a little more selective burning and dodging was done using Photoshop’s tools. The final touch was applying the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex Pro.

I like to think that the final black and white version of Megan’s portrait has a 1940’s femme fatale look. While the original unretouched color image (above) was nice, I think the monochrome version is more dynamic and graphic. But hey, if you like the color version, that’s OK too.

 


 

You can learn all of my tips, tools and techniques on shooting available light glamour photography in my book surprisingly titled  “Available Light Glamour Photography”. New copies of the book are available from Amazon for $28.79 with used copies starting around twenty bucks, as write this. The Kindle version is $25.41 for those preferring a digital format.