Must I fear? I’m into glamour photography. I depict people, actual persons. I completely rely on digital format in my work. Will I be completely outdated soon?
I would really love to know for sure where the future of Glamour Photographs 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 dont 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. The time may come though when photographers are replaced by specialized 3D rendering software.
To make my presumptions more of a forecast rather than a prophecy, we should pay a closer look to the present and recall some pages of the past.
In the distant past glamour images were painted with oil onto canvas. Renowned painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created those paintings: from innocent face portraits to nudes. 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. It was the dawn of portraits - quite a successful one, even though people portrayed had to go through real torture of standing still for an hour or more. It was customary to utilize head-clamps, so the subjects could hold their head still. Quite obviously, the sight of a person with a clamped head had little to do with glamour.
as photography progressed, the whole process became easier. The emergence of film made beauty photography a lot easier and more affordable. Glamour pictures were published by a number of magazines. David Mecey, the famous Playboy photographer, once said that in the recent past they had to use large format cameras for shooting pictures for centerfolds - all for the sake of quality. 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.
At the moment glamour pictures are mostly digital. Small and medium format. Due to the increasedquality and resolution almost any digital camera can produce a photo to fit on a magazine’s centerfold.
So now the possible ways for Artistic Glamour Photography to progress look quite intriguing. Shall we witness the dawn of 3D technology? Should it be so, then it’s already there. 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 very own gallery of virtual three-dimensional glamour! Surfing on the Internet, it’s quite noticeable that many people use specialized 3D software only to make up some feminine, exotic and beautiful models. 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 dont panic! I will always support what I’m 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.