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How I Shot These Etherial Portraits With A Lensbaby

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So this is happening more and more… I’m talking with a client who wants me to shoot a creative portrait of them, and they say, “I like your blurry photos, I want that look.” My blurry photos? Most of the time that’s not something a photographer wants to hear, but I know they’re referring to the shots I’ve done over the years with the Lensbaby creative effects lenses.

I’ve been shooting studio portraits with them for a long time now and there’s nothing quite like them. It takes practice, some trial and error to learn the idiosyncrasies. And with lots of lens kits, focal options, etc., their product line now has a very comprehensive set of tools and it continues to grow (yay, more toys! err…I mean tools).

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How Good (And Bad) Retouching Impacts Your Objective Age

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A few days ago it started – suddenly these portraits sprouted everywhere like mushrooms after the rain, with pictures of people and a postit note on their forehead which states their age.

Behind this fed is a new “service” called how-Old, which claims to give an accurate guesstimate of your age based on a single photo. As a retoucher I often encounter this problem; a model still has a few more years to “steal” or actually to “give” to the industry. I had to test how many years I can take of a model with retouching and while this is a lighthearted post, the results were quite interesting.

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The Atlas of Beauty Compares Gorgeous Women from 37 Countries

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Mihaela Noroc is a 29 year old photographer from Romania who decided to quit her boring job and spend her life savings on a worldwide photographic trip.

“The Atlas of Beauty is about our planet’s diversity shown through portraits of women”, she says in an interview with DIYPhotography.

Since she started this project two years ago she has visited 37 countries, and hopes to eventually photograph women in every country in the world.

So far she has done so in every continent other that Antarctica and the results are both stunning and thought provoking.

Noroc chooses to photograph only good-looking women, and it is this common denominator that makes the comparison of local cultures and standards of beauty so powerful.

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100 Years of African-American and Iranian Beauty Time-Lapsed Into One Minute Each

A couple of months ago we shared with you the original 100 Years of Beauty video, showing the changing hair and makeup styles common among white women in America between 1910 and 2010.

Following the huge success of the first video, which received 20 million views, Cut.com has created two more videos. The second video in the series depicts popular beauty among African-American woman in the past century, and the third video, which was just released, gives us a glimpse of the vast changes that took place among the women of Iran.

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How Women’s Beauty Standards Have Changed Through The Eras: 3,000 Years In 180 Seconds

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 Over the last few years we have seen the industry going against too skinny, too Photoshopped and just plain too western beauty standards. For me it is always amazing to that the beauty standards that we hold as glorious today are actually pretty short  lived.

The team at Buzzfeed produced a 3 minutes video going all the way from ancient Egypt till nowadays showing how beauty standards have changed. It was not alway about being thin. Actually during the renaissance skinny meant starving and the general concept of beauty was pretty full.

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An Exercise In Dodge & Burn: Turning A Golf Ball Into A Pingpong Ball

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Dodge & Burn (fondly called D&B) are one of the simplest and most powerful techniques that you can use in retouching. One of the interesting uses of D&B is the answer to the following question: “How can I get blemishes off my model?”.

If you break this down to the basic components this is a very easy question to answer.

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Brain Scan Shows How 14 People Would Like To be Photoshopped To Perfection

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How would like to be photoshopped given the opportunity to give your face what your heart desires. Note that your heart and your head do not always desire the same thing.

This is exactly the question that photographer and psychologist  Scott Chasserot was out to find out by combining Photography, Photoshop and Brain Scans. He dubbed the project Original Ideal.

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Journalist Checks Beauty Concept By Having Herself Photoshopped In 40 Countries

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Over the time, we’ve seen many here-is-a-picture-how-can-you-shop-it projects, but something sets Before & After apart. In this project, journalist Esther Honig took her unedited image and had it Photoshopped by 22 individuals so far.

Honing sent her image to about 40 retouch artists at varying levels from amateur to pro, and asked them to retouch her photo (seen right after the jump), with a simple single directive: “make me beautiful“. Contact came via several freelancing channels (most notably Fiverr) so work has been committed at rates between $5 and $30. This is pretty cheap for a pro retouch, but still the wide selection of skill and geographical locations  provides a window into the concept of beauty as it is perceived in various regions of the world.

Honig shares that:[Read More…]

Fashion Shoot Anatomy And Post Production With Dave Piper [NSFW]

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It had been a while since I had shot on a DSLR, most of last year I had shot on the Fuji X-Pro or a Pentax 645d. I was starting to shoot more and more video and thought that maybe it was time to pick up a 5dm2 or something similar. I even thought about the 5dm3 and was just about to buy one when my good friend Martin Gillman announced he was selling his D800, humm, I thought.. Yes.. Deal. I picked the Sigma 35mm Art lens and the 105mm macro (will be looking at the 50mm Sigma too). For video, I will be renting things like the Zeiss Compact zooms.

Martin dropped the camera off and I just needed to shoot asap, I spoke to my lovely lady friend Ameila and we formed plan to shoot some lingerie with Penny Grimley on the make up. The styling was made up from a few places and things we could find quickly. (Fleur of England, Cristina Adami and Henry Hunt).

I am a big Fuji X-Pro fan, in fact I am a Fuji X-Photographer, I spent most of last year without a DSLR at all and I started to really miss one. The idea of such a powerful multi-use tool started to really make sense. From Leaf to Leica, d90 to 645d, I have shot with and worked with everything. Pretty much all of last year, I didn’t touch a DSLR and after picked up the D800 again…. I can totally say with full confidence, DSLR is always going to be the future. Such multi-use, powerful cameras will never die. There is a place in the market for Compact System Cameras (CSC), DSLRs & Medium formats (MF). I still don’t think we need FF CSC’s though, or CMOS Hassy’s. I like that each has it’s own area and use. Maybe DSLR is the new Bridge camera from hobby to work tool ?? Either way.. The lenses are getting better to cope with the sensors and the 35mm Sigma and the 55mm Zeiss make the D800 seem like a totally different camera to the one I took to the USA and Africa a couple of years ago ! It is good to see that the lens and camera manufacturers are putting time into getting good glass out there into the market. Thank you Fuji, Nikon, Sigma and Zeiss… Love you all !![Read More…]

Talk To Your Daughter Before The Beauty Industry Does

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We have talked about the impact that the industry has over our lives and persception of beautiful before. and we are happy to see that some of the advertisers are shifting away from plastic barbies used for models like the campaign done by UK fashion chain Debenhams which featured beautiful people of all kinds. We are also seeing some a backlash toward the industry on the form aware artists like Anna Hill.

We are often asked why we are featuring those stories and I think this punch-to-the-guts movie by Tim Piper (although a bit old) does a better work at explaining this than we can.

[Beauty Pressure | Tim Piper][Read More…]

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