Today’s Post by Blue Moon Staff
“Just because you’ve never done something doesn’t mean you can’t start.” ― Miss Benson’s Beetle
So how did I get started in boudoir and glamour photography? It was an indirect route and worth mentioning only because it might also describe you. When my wife and I opened our studio in 1982, we divided the workload based on the kind of photography we were best at: She photographed people and I photographed things, products but mostly architecture. Because of scheduling conflicts sometimes I would have to shoot a few business portraits but people were really her forte. When we sold the studio things changed.
I’d always admired and respected the work of Peter Gowland and late in his life, was fortunate to have struck up a friendship with him. In the 1980’s, I began avidly collecting and reading Gowland’s glamour photography books. Then in the late 1990’s when looking at some of the new glamour images that began appearing on the Web, I became interested in working in the genre. When my wife and I sold the studio because of my health problems, we also sold almost all of the lighting equipment, so I had to start building a lighting kit from scratch because before that time I honestly believed that “I wasn’t ever going to photograph people.”
That’s when I learned you can never say never or “ever” and started learning how to make glamour images with little or no equipment. You may be interested in trying boudoir photography but think that it’s difficult, you need lots of expensive equipment or models are hard to find. It’s going to much less difficult if you’ve been interested in photography for a while and are familiar with the basics including focus, composition and exposure. If that description fits, you’ll be ready to make your first glamour photograph.
How I Made this Portrait: For the featured intimate portrait of Erin Valakari, the backdrop used was a Photo Gray Savage Infinity vinyl background hanging from my still falling-apart JTL background stands. Lighting was from a single Paul C Buff DigiBee with a Plume Wafer HexOval 100 (37.5 x 27.5 by 12 inches deep) attached and placed at camera right with a 32-inch reflector located at camera left. The camera used was my former go-to Panasonic Lumix GH4 with G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens at 31mm and an exposure of 1/160 sec and f/6.3 and ISO 200.
It was shot with my now-standard RAW+JPEG format, with copies of the JPEGs given to the model for her use and the RAW files used to create images for the blog and any other use. The RAW file was retouched with Imagenomic’s Portraiture, then tweaked using Vivenza and Color Efex to produce the image you see here
