Over the festive season I bought FHM, Shape, SA Sports Illustrated, Zoo - that sort of thing - with a view to looking at how the guys are shooting their models. I thought I might learn something. As it turns out, I felt they had executed their work pretty badly.
Sure, I saw a few exceptions, one nice effort (in the Sports Illustrated Calendar) was a lovely picture of Elbe van der Merwe with her ice blue eyes lying in a tropical bath with flowers floating around her. She's wearing an emerald green bikini...anyway, that was a great picture. Many I felt showed no understanding and didn't really show off the girls leaving something to be desired.
Shooting a Sports Model (as opposed to a vanilla model) is an easier way to capture the vitality and beauty in a young model, that spark, because there's a real life behind the looks: that's muscle tone, not dieting and gym work, and a natural tan from the sun, not a sunbed. What's more, you're also dealing with a healthy, happy, motivated human individual.
The psychology of many professional photographers appears to be to create highly unnatural, superficial and artificial conditions (particularly in terms of lighting), and then put the models in creative but highly faked scenarios. Koo koo. The models are actually real human beings. Beautiful, but real. In some of the calendar pictures models are superimposed against a sunset background. It may be a pretty picture, but then then so is the wrapping on a average chocolate bar. There's not a connection to the image because the brain can see that the picture doesn't entirely make sense. Why are there not shadows, no imperfections, no signs of life? Why is this person staring at me dead and plastic. Turn the page.
I'm not proposing that magazines go all arty (but that might be a nice departure from current sterility). I'm simply saying that what's truly beautiful doesn't need to be embellished. I'm also saying that beauty - real beauty - is natural. I'm not saying you have to be a purist - sure you can sharpen and crop your images, if you can fine tune, by all means do so. I'm saying it's off the rails to start off from the insecure viewpoint that you need all these props to take a really beautiful photograph, before you're even there. You're already making concessions because you're not sure you can capture the life and vitality of your scenario. Of course you fucking can! Fucking try!
The Team Puff Is Irrelevant
You can see and smell that a whole team of people went with these girls to Moz or Madland, people to help hold up light boards, makeup etc was applied, measurements made etc. Why? In the real world girls on the beach get sand in their hair, a bit of seawater on their costumes. They also move, jump around, walk, laugh, do spontaneous things (because they are after all living creatures, not dolls). Real people don't stand around like mannequins, while a perfect sun swoons across the sky, and every leaf and grain of sand stands to attention. Are these guys purposely bullshitting us that they're rendering heaven and its heavenly creatures? Koo koo! Even if that is the idea; it's not sexy. It's too sterile and unnatural.
One reason for this sterility could be - I don't know - that some of the photographer's are homosexual, or burnt out, or bored. If you have a genuine love for and admiration for the girls (that doesn't mean you're infatuated, just appreciative) you're working with, you'll take care to show them in real light, being themselves, and trusting that their beauty will shine though. And that this will be enough. If you're a good photographer, and your model is even a little bit special, it should be. The inspiration is there, just let it flow.
Obsessive Compulsive Dof Disorder
I think the worldly obsession with beauty means that people are afraid to not do their damnedest to crank up the special effects when it comes to beauty. This means they no longer trust their own instincts (or they don't have any). Or they are so jaundiced that they don't get a little butterfly dancing in their stomachs when they realise, in front of them, is a thing of beauty.
A Thing Of Beauty must be allowed to be itself. Not herded and shackled. Youth is unbridled, wild, free, naive, natural, innocent - at times. Use natural lightning whenever you can. Watch the light, especially the light of the morning and late afternoon. Work with it. Use the natural environment. Be The Creature. Don't tell the creature what or who to Be. How can you when the Beauty is not you? All you can do is position yourself around her, and capture the nuances. True beauty is real. To the extent that it isn't, it isn't really beautiful, and to the extent that you pretend it is, you are a bullshitter and your audience will cotton on to this deception. Props belong in a theatre, and if you're not sure you believe this, perhaps you do too.
Meanwhile, Elbe needs her own website, because I spent ages trawling through Google, and came up with very little I could use here, hence, Princess Leia.
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