Must I fear? I practice glamour images . I depict people, actual persons. I follow a completely digital workflow. Will I be completely outdated soon?
What I wouldn’t give to learn where the path of progress will lead Glamour Pictures. I would gladly tell this to you, dear fellow artist, on the pages of my glamour blog. However, it may well turn out that we “knights of light and lens” will be down with our chips. Almost a half of the whole creative process is now performed in applications like Photoshop. The first half of the creation process, the actual taking of a photograph, is still with us. The time may come though when photographers are replaced by specialized 3D rendering software.
If we want to get the whole picture though, we really need to reminisce about the past and carefully study the present.
In the distant past glamour images were painted with oil onto canvas. The full range from simple, innocent face portraits up to full body nude portraits was popular and was painted for example by famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Then, in the mid-19th century, cameras came into being. Those things were big, heavy and slow-performing: it would sometimes take hours to produce just one decent shot. It was the dawn of portraits – quite a successful one, even though people portrayed had to go through real torture of standing still for an hour or more. Often head-clamps were used to help the subject holding their head still during the exposure. Of course, such images were not so glamorous – unless you can appreciate the beauty of a clamped head.
as photography progressed, the whole process became easier. Shooting photos on film made it affordable and practical to shoot glamour photos. Magazines started publishing such photos. I can recall the Playboy photographer David Mecey talking about the very recent past, in which they had to shoot every Playboy centerfold with large format cameras for quality reasons. Poor guys had to carry around a whole lot of lights and they often drove the whole place crazy with their strobes.
At the moment glamour pictures are mostly digital. Those of small and medium-sized format. Due to the increasedquality and resolution almost any digital camera can produce a photo to fit on a magazine’s centerfold.
Now it’s very interesting to forecast the possibilities of the further development for Beauty Photography. Will we see an advent of 3D rendering software? Should it be so, then it’s already there. My favorite German magazine on Photoshop now features more and more articles about 3D rendering programs. Internet now hosts more and more 3D rendered glamour pictures. I’ve got friends out there who have their own virtual identities and post Flickr photo streams filled with rendered images. Their very own gallery of virtual three-dimensional glamour! Surfing on the Internet, it’s quite noticeable that many people use specialized 3D software only to make up some feminine, exotic and beautiful models. The generated elf images a lot of times hold all the attributes of glamour images.
It’s possible that we glamour photographers will become living anachronisms. Glamour photographers, be alarmed just dont panic! Personally, I trust in what I do. Just as painting and film have survived, there will always be a huge demand for digital glamour images, made with a DSLR, inspiration, fine lighting and much love.
