It’s #fridaythethirteenth and upcoming (next Thursday) is National Lash Day, a day that promotes the love and need for true and false eyelashes. Eyelashes are a staple for every makeup look and have been known to make a woman’s eyes stand out from the crowd. That certainly includes today’s featured model, Erin Valakari aka Vala the Artist.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.”― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
One day, I was talking with a photographer/friend from the East Coast who emailed me some of his latest glamour portraits. I was surprised to notice that almost all of the portraits were basically headshots. They were really, really great looking headshots but headshots nonetheless, which got me thinking…
What is a portrait anyway?
My friend Rick Sammon likes to say that “The Camera Looks Both Ways.” While I ponder the existential nature of my friend’s quote, I also wonder what today’s featured portrait says about me other than I’m just trying to make the best possible photograph of the model, which is my typical goal during these kinds of glamour photography sessions. Richard Avedon once said that, “a portrait is a picture of a person being photographed” but maybe and more importantly, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, it’s also a picture of the person making the photograph.
When you embark on a quest to learn about creating the ultimate glamour portrait, you’ll encounter images that are conceptual in nature and these, while seemingly about the subject, more often than not reveal more about the photographer than you might think.
Maybe that’s why Richard Avedon also said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” While I don’t know for sure exactly what he meant by that, what I think he meant is that when creating a portrait he likes to control as much of the environment and maybe even the subject to reflect his view of them and not necessarily how the subject sees themselves. In perhaps this same way, some of that thinking may apply to my own studio work too. Or maybe it’s just another form of my OCD or do all/some/many photographers have this same affliction because their images strive to reorder the world into how they imagine it should be not what it really is.
How I Made this portrait:While I don’t often feature “Before and After” images in these posts, since the subtext of National Lash Day is all about makeup, I think these two images show how makeup can change the way a women looks and also, I think, about how she feels about herself and that’s expressed physically, as you can see, in slight changes in her pose in the .second image. For a look at what Erin looked like when she walked in, with a little poetic license when I asked her to unbutton her shirt, it’s above right,
The image (above left) of the incredible Erin Valakari was one of 13 similar poses I made in that particular sequence; This image was frame 13, the final one. The portrait was made in my 11×15-foot home studio with a Paul C. Buff DigiBee 800 and a Plume Ltd Wafer soft box attached that was used as the main light and placed at camera right. An AlienBee 800 with an 18-inch Paul C Buff OMNI reflector with Triple layer diffuser sock is at camera left with another Digibee with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella was placed in the back left corner of my studio .
The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 43mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/11 and ISO 200. The background was a inexpensive muslin backdrop hung on JTL background stands. The image was lightly retouched and tweaked with Photoshop CS6 with some additional tweaks in Vivenza.
PostScript: You can see how I created this very portrait in a short behind-the-scenes video on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Video. You can watch it by clicking here.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), please click here. And if you do, thanks so much.
My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography and includes information on all of the cameras used as well as the complete exposure data for each image. Used books start around thirteen bucks.as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.