Blog #195 2/16/17
If you start with one of those one-in-a-million rare beautiful faces of a young woman from just about anywhere on earth, you have a reasonable chance of making an image of beauty that is… well, perfectly beautiful. Given help from people with skill and artistic capacity in make-up and hair, special and exacting lighting and preferably a long lens, an excellent image should result. If the finding of just the right model and the most talented assistants can sometimes be a daunting process, making the exceptional photograph, once everything is in place, should be far less so. But success is never automatic, or guaranteed.
The images in this blog required great planning as well as close, collaborative teamwork, creativity, patience, imagination, ingenuity, fantasy, and a unified vision on the part of the hair and make-up artists, stylists, models and yours truly, all of us willing to take chances with the hope that the gods of beauty would smile on us.
Using complex combinations of colored gels, double exposure and camera movement, every image I made was a surprise, this one a memorable and blissful one.
We used body paint to cover and color her full torso. Along with the hair, and her particular attitude, the model, and image, wowed us all.
Final touches always matter, since every detail is important. I’ve said before, “an image can only be as good as its weakest part.” Or, “One mediocre element in an image and the best it can be is mediocre.“
And yet, sometimes messing things up can really work!
It is one thing for a model to be beautiful; it is not enough, really. The ability to “look” with an attitude filled with subtle feelings, that is essential and rare.
When a model can look like this, you know you’re on the road to elation.
Sin and sinlessness
Innocence and sensuality
Curled up and then looking like this!?
A mixture of many things – the pose, the hair, the light, her attitude and the bustier – all contribute.
In our modern, internet connected world, with ready access to millions of such images, beauty images become almost banal. What’s the big deal? one may ask with some justification. The main reason I, personally, continue to invent and create beauty images (aside from commissioned advertising and editorial work) is to make images that surprise and delight myself. My efforts are to take unknown paths, reach into the dark, explore the heavens, all in search of visual imagery that I have not seen before, photographs that jolt and shock me, and bring pleasure to my bones and soul.
Making photographs of beauty puts me on that path. I feel the urge, and give in to it, to alter one or more traditional approaches, to break rules, to add unlikely elements, all of which to make an image that is new and unique.
I have failed over and over in this quest, but I squeeze every bit of imaginative effort out of my gut in a passionate and relentless treasure hunt for wonder.
How can one not wonder?
Glitterati Incorporated, the publisher of the Retrospective, Schatz Images: 25 Years is now offering the two- book boxed set at a discount from the original price. The set comes with an 11″x14” print of the buyer’s choice.
http://schatzimages25years-glitterati.com