What Is Glamour Photography?
Glamour photography is the closest art form to painting since its main goal is to stylize an image as a work of art. It isn't meant to show reality, but the perception of an idealized reality. While it most often is associated with women, it can be done with anybody.
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History
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Glamour photography started off nearly as soon as cameras were invented. While we may tend to think about early photographs being stark, sharp reality, in truth early portraits were designed to present the best image possible of the subject, man, woman or child. Early photos, for example, often show portraits of people looking off to one side or the other, essentially striking poses. It really came into its own, however, when modern celebrity started to matter to the public in the first part of the 20th century.
Basics
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Since glamour images are meant to show the subject in the best light possible, it immediately became necessary to hide imperfections. Make-up started to be used to hide blemishes and wrinkles.
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Lighting
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Lighting is important, too, for the glamour photographer. Soft light, usually diffused or bounced, gave softer images such as those used in Hollywood's Golden Age for actresses such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Some of these techniques carried back and forth between still photography and motion pictures. For example, in the 1934 film "The Thin Man," the "bad" women tend to be shown in glaring light and sharp focus, whereas the star, Myrna Loy, almost always is shown in soft tones with diffuse light.
Techniques
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Another technique, often used by Bob Guccione in Penthouse magazine, was the Vaseline trick. Guccione was famous for smearing Vaseline on his camera lens to produce soft, dream-like images. The same effect can be had be putting a shear piece of fabric across the lens. Later, companies such as Cokin, devised filters that attached to lenses that soften the images.
Going Digital
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With the advent of digital photography, and more specifically, image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop, glamour effects can be added after the image is shot. Photoshop has a filter, for example, called Diffuse Glow that can turn an ordinary portrait into a glamour shot. Whether done on film or in Photoshop, the idea still is the same: to produce images of a dream-like quality that glamorize the model photographed.
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