The future of glamour images – photographers be alarmed!
Should I be afraid? I am a glamour photographer. I am portraying real life people. I follow a completely digital workflow. Will I be completely outdated soon?
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| The first famous glamour image: Betty Grable |
I would really love to know for sure where the future of glamour images lies. And I would be happy to share this with you, dear photographer, in my glamour blog. Then on the other hand, it might be that we photographers soon don’t play a big role in this game anymore. A large portion of our work, probably the second half of the whole process, is nowadays already done digitally in Photoshop. The first half of the creation process, the actual taking of a photograph, is still with us. However chances are that we hand over this part to specialized rendering applications soon.
But in order to get a feel for the future of something it is absolutely worth taking a close look at the present and also visiting the past.
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| Contempory glamour image #191 by Michael Zelbel |
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. In the middle of the 19th century the first cameras became available. These were big bulky dry-plate cameras for studio use, which required quite long shutter times. Portraits became popular fast, but the subjects had to sit or stand completely still for quite a long time.
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| Is 3D-rendering the future of glamour images? (cc) by Franck Genot, www.myvirtuallady.com |
Often head-clamps where used to help the subject holding their head still during the exposure. Obviously, with a clamped head a model usually will not add a lot of glamour to a glamour photo.
With the advent of photography and the advances of camera technology the game changed. 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. This meant that they had to use a ton of light and a lot of times they blew the fuses of the location on which they were shooting when they started to use their strobes.
Currently glamour photos are pretty much always taken with digital cameras. Small and medium format. The quality of the digital cameras increased in a way that it is no problem whatsoever to shoot a magazine cover with a little consumer camera.
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| Easy and affordable tools for 3D rendering – the democratisation of glamour |
Now future of glamour images will be quite interesting. Will we see an advent of 3D rendering software? If so, then this future already started. My favorite German magazine on Photoshop now features more and more articles about 3D rendering programs. I spot more and more glamour type generated images online. I have online buddies who are complete virtual identities from Second Life and similar and who post Flickr photo streams which consists entirely of rendered images. Their own virtual glamour gallery! Surfing online, it seems like the most common use of 3D rendering software like poser these days is the generation of elves, the beautiful exotic female characters in mystical stories. The generated elf images a lot of times hold all the attributes of glamour images.
So chances are good, that I personally, the guy with the digital camera, am soon be the dinosaur in the field of glamour images. Glamour photographers, be alarmed – just don’t panic! However, I believe in what I am doing. And I see that the art of oil painting has survived, the art of photographing on film is still practiced with magnificent results and I am sure that as long as I live there will always be a need for glamour images made with digital photo cameras, good light and a lot of love.
Good light!
— Michael
Posted in glamour images
