It’s not just #anythingcanhappen day, today’s post features one of the most delightful models that I ever photographed—Toni. It’s also National Name Yourself Day and proposes one day a year to reinvent your name. Having recently celebrated National Joe Day, I’m happy with my name.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.” —
If you’re new to glamour photography, here are a few tips, suggestion and ideas that should serve you well when posing subjects during a shoot. Because this kind of image and subject are different from someone who needs a business portrait, headshot or family photograph, the entire process will also be a little different than what you’re used to, or maybe not.
Where It All Starts
The process of creating any kind of glamour photograph starts by developing a good working relationship with the subject and begins witj the first moment you meet them, Nowhere will your personality, working style, and communication skills be more helpful than when you have that subject in front of your camera, so getting started on the right foot will make the session go smoother. .
During this kind of portrait session, you should start by respecting a model’s privacy. Be sure to give her a private place to change and do her makeup. Next door to my home studio is a full-size bathroom that, during a shoot, is dedicated to the model’s use. The bathroom includes a vanity-style lighting fixture that’s ideal for putting on make-up.
Before starting the session, you should talk to the subject about the kind of photographs you and she may have in mind and how you will go about executing them. Explain the kind of images that you are looking to produce, tell her the type of attitude you want her to express and share any other information that will help her relax and let you both create an image that will be mutually satisfactory.
If she’s new at this kind of photo session, give her additional time to warm up by shooting more than just a few test shots and use that time to also refine the lighting. Even if she’s somewhat experienced, some kind of warm up is good for both the model and photographer to get them ready to create new and exciting images. I also use the warm-up time to obtain the best exposure and will show also her what she looks like on the camera’s LCD, helping her to relax by showing how great she looks! The featured image was made at a group model shoot where there is never enough time to do a warm up as there is in your own studio. I think Toni and I had less that 15 minutes total to make this and 21 other images. At right, you can see the results of what happens when you don’t do any testing.
Don’t worry about the poses you create during this warm up time but you might be surprised how good a pose you might find by accident, while helping her relax at the same time. Talk her through the steps as you refine the pose and once she gets the idea of what you want, you can easily repeat the sequence.
After that, as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy suggests, “just keep banging those rocks together” or in this case making some images while exploring different poses. You might want to try my technique of “Shooting through a Pose” where you keep making variations of a pose until you get it “right” but then keep clicking that shutter looking for surprises. The real secret, if there is any, is to keep the session casual and informal. The result? Better photographs.
How I Made this Portrait: If you are familiar with my work, you’ll know this image is the least “Joe Farace style” portrait I’ve ever published. The model is Toni and I was lucky to photograph her two other times although the image files from one of those shoots, an extremely sexy one, seems to have been lost. I’m sure it’s on a hard drive I have in storage and it’s been my intention to find those lost images.
This portrait was made during a group model shoot in Loveland. Colorado but Toni was the only model that brought the kind of clothing that worked with the background producing a kind of Renaissance image that’s not usually my style but I love her look, pose and attitude. Lighting was from a single continuous light source; I don’t remember the model. The camera I used was a Canon EOS 10D with the EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II lens at 45mm with an exposure of 1/6 sec at f/4 and ISO 800 and a minus two stop exposure compensation.
In Photoshop, the first thing I did was to correct for the original JPEG file’s underexposure using the techniques I explain here. Next, because of the years spent as an engineer, I used the Ruler tool in conjunction with the Image>Image Rotation>Arbitrary command to straighten the vertical lines on the background. (I feel so much better now.) Next, I used the burn and dodge tools in Photoshop and PhotoKit to produce the overall lighting effect you see. Then I ran Dfine to control the noise, which surprisingly was not that bad when compared with Tuesday’s post’s featured image. I wrapped up the processing by adding softness and further minimizing noise with the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex.
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