Today’s Post by Blue Moon Staff
The moment between before and after is called Truth. — Dainin Katagiri
As we begin a new year many people—men and women—make resolutions to get in better shape for 2024, including workouts at the health club, a better diet or maybe just taking better overall care of oneself.
Case Study: The image at right shows how Erin looked when she walked into our studio, before doing her makeup and putting on the lingerie she brought with her. The image at below left was one of the fifty-plus images we made during our session when she was wearing this red lingerie and was the 19th frame from that group of images.
The latter images were variations on the same pose but continued as she gradually removed most of the lingerie until she was effectively nude—which was her choice. She had four other outfits and when the session was finished we has made at total of 292 different images that she got to take home on a flash drive that was ready for her after she finished dressing in her street clothes. At that point she had planned to use some of them for images for websites that paid her money for these kinds of images.
In the past I have created two kinds of sessions for models (or women who may be aspiring models) and are planning on changing their looks:
- ‘Before’ Portraits: I will make a before portrait showing how you look at the start of your self-improvement project. And don’t worry these photographs will be our little secret, although I will be glad to provide a CD or a flash drive of all of the ‘before’ images upon request..
- ‘After’ portraits: If 2024 was the year where you made lots of changes to your look and are already an ‘all new you’ we will be glad to make an ‘after’ portrait showing how great you look right now!
How I Made this Portrait
Today’s featured image of Erin was made in my home-based studio. The lighting setup used a Paul C. Buff DigiBee DB800 monolight with a Plume Ltd hexagonal Wafer soft box that was placed at camera right. An Alien Bee B800 monolight with an 18-inch Paul C Buff OMNI reflector with triple layer diffuser sock is at camera left while another Digibee with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella that was placed in a back left corner of the studio. The background was an inexpensive muslin background suspended from a JTL background stands with drapig provided by Home Deport clamps.
The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 31mm) that I purchased from a camera store in Japan. The exposure was 1/125 sec at f/11 and ISO 200. Image was color balanced with PictoColor’s iCorrect Portrait plug-in, retouched using my standard retouching techniques and then tweaked using the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex.
Attention models (or women who want to be models): Please contact us via the Contact tab above and let’s schedule your free ‘before’ or ‘after’ photo shoot.
