Behind the Glamour

Glamour and fashion photography is a great deal of fun. It also takes a lot of work and planning to create images that appear to be “effortlessly glamourous.”

The theme, lighting, make-up and relationship with your model all need to be in sync for you to pull it off. I’ve done it alone before, but I usually I have a good team behind me. I recently had an unusually large team behind me for a fashion/glamour shoot. The team consisted of me, our model Tasha Johnson, Make-up Artist Susan Ko Morihara, my long-time friend and helper Marshall and two newer helpers, Orlando and Kaveh. Orlando took on double duty and captured the behind the scenes stills and video (thanks Orlando!).

The theme, lighting, make-up and relationship with your model all need to be in sync for you to pull it off. I’ve done it alone before, but I usually I have a good team behind me. I recently had an unusually large team behind me for a fashion/glamour shoot. The team consisted of me, our model Tasha Johnson, Make-up Artist Susan Ko Morihara, my long-time friend and helper Marshall and two newer helpers, Orlando and Kaveh. Orlando took on double duty and captured the behind the scenes stills and video (thanks Orlando!).

We started with the theme or concept. There is nothing wrong with using someone else’s work as inspiration--you just cannot create an exact (or close to exact) copy of the work. That crosses the line from “inspiration” to “infringement.” Tasha wanted something along the lines of the Guess Jeans campaign. My interpretation of that was strong fairly harsh lighting in an outdoor urban setting. The weather was lousy on the day of the shoot with ominous looking clouds and the constant threat of rain. However, the gray skies actually helped create the look that we were after. You all know by now that I bring a studio strobe with me on all of my location shoots. There would be no doubt that the strobe would the main light given the dull dim ambient light, so I could fairly easily manipulate the darkness of the background by exposing for my strobe and altering the shutter speed. I tried to keep the background about one-stop under my main (strobe plus ambient) to keep detail, but also make the gray skies a little darker and increase the contrast in the image.

The lighting gear consisted of a Dynalite Uni400 monohead plugged into a Dynalite Power Inverter fitted with a beauty dish with no diffusion. The gold part of a Photoflex 5-in-1 reflector kit was used to bounce whatever sunlight we had back into Tasha and add some needed warmth to the images. We used a scrap piece of mirrored plexiglas to catch the dim sunlight and create whatever rim light we could.

Marshall manipulates the gold reflector to bounce some needed color into the photographs while Kaveh tries to find an edge light. There was enough sun creeping through the clouds to sometimes create a beautiful hair light.

The location of the shoot gave us access to a boat yard where we found a great old beat-up boat to add to the scene.

This time Kaveh uses the gold reflector to breathe life into the flat “bluish” light from the sky while Marshall adjusts the strobe. Note the power inverter next to the light stand. The inverter is one of the most important pieces of equipment that I own: it allows me to plug in my UNI400 and shoot as fast as I can in the studio. The recycle time does increase as the battery power diminishes.

I was very pleased with the results of this shoot. I started with a general idea of what Tasha wanted and quickly turned it into my own vision. It certainly helped having three guys moving and setting up gear so I could focus more on the model and the lighting. A very talented make-up artist and beautiful model helped a wee bit too! Tasha is always great fun to work with! 

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© Steve Dantzig