My Sunday series on outdoor portraiture continues today with a portrait of Shea. She is a beautiful model who I was lucky enough to photograph at two different group model shoots that were hosted by the late Dave Hall.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Several years ago I was invited to be a guest speaker at the FOTOfusion conference in Florida that’s sponsored by the Palm Beach PhoTographic Centre. At the check-in table I got to interact with some of the other speakers, some of whom I knew, some I knew by name and others I didn’t know. One of the young men I didn’t know introduced himself to me. He was extremely handsome, dressed like “a photographer” with impeccably coiffed hair and asked me, “what do you photograph?” I’ll admit to being somewhat flummoxed by the question. It’s something I never really thought about and after a moment’s pause, I told him, “I photograph beautiful things, like women and cars.” He looked at me like I had two heads, although I never thought of myself as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Then he walked away shaking his head.
You know what? I still like to photograph beautiful things but I could have added “nature” to my original statement. And speaking of “beautiful things”…
Photographing Shea
According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, a portrait is “a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders” or maybe…
…a portrait is just a picture of a person who knows they’re being photographed. More importantly, as Oscar Wilde once wisely pointed out, it’s also a picture of the person making the photograph. My friend Rick Sammon likes to say that, “the camera looks both ways” and I think he’s right about that. What my portraits, like today’s featured image, say about me, I can only wonder…
How I Made this Photograph: Today’s featured model is Shea who was one of the most beautiful models I ever photographed. I called one of the images I made of her “The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships” because I think she has the beauty of the mythological Helen of Troy. Helen was a woman of remarkable beauty and was the main reason for the legendary Trojan War. Euripides said, “Helen’s destiny was to cause deaths in order to relieve the earth from arrogant humans.”
This much is true about Shea: Every time I post an image of her, I get email from some photographer who wants to get in touch with her so he can photograph her too. Let me make this clear: It has been a long time since I photographed Shea and I have no contact information for her at all, so please don’t ask.
This portrait was made during one of the first of the two group of model shoots where I photographed Shea. The camera used was a Canon EOS 10D with one of my favorite lenses, the versatile EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens (at 63mm.) It’s been discontinued by the manufacturer but you can pick up used copies of this lens from many sources, including KEH and MPB. The exposure was 1/200 sec at f/11 and ISO 200. A Canon 550EX speedlite was used as fill, although I think it could have used a little more output. Overall, it’s slightly underexposed and has a few distracting background elements but I still like it. The original image file’s underexposure was corrected using this technique.
Special Note: You can see a monochrome version of this same image, along with an unretouched JPEG of the original file, on this post. The retouching on this color image is slightly different than that photograph. If anybody can spot the differences or has some comments about them, drop me an email and if you’re right, I’ll send you a nice present. PS I think I made the monochrome version is too dark.
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 “temporarily not available” from Amazon but you can pick up used copies starting around twenty-five bucks as I write this. Kindle copes are $27.12 if you prefer a digital format.