The Future Of Glamour Images Photographers Be Alarmed!
Should I be afraid? I practice glamour images . I take pictures of living people. My art is carried out by means of digital technology. Am I likely to fail to keep up with the progress?
I would really love to know for sure where the future of Glamour Photos lies. And I would be happy to share this with you, dear photographer, in my glamour blog. However, it may well turn out that we “knights of light and lens” will be down with our chips. A large portion of our work, probably the second half of the whole process, is nowadays already done digitally in Photoshop. Performing the most important stage of work is still up to us though – I mean the actual shooting. 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.
There was time when beauty images and glamour art only existed in the form of oil paintings. 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. Cameras dawned just “recently” in terms of world history – in the middle of the 19th century. They were anything but convenient, small and ergonomic – large and technically primitive, the first cameras could only be used in studios and required quite a long time to produce a single picture. Portraits became popular fast, but the subjects had to sit or stand completely still for quite a long time. It was customary to utilize head-clamps, so the subjects could hold their head still. Of course, such images were not so glamorous – unless you can appreciate the beauty of a clamped head.
With the development of visual arts and the technical progress it all became simpler. Taking pictures on film was more suitable for the purposes of glamour photography. 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. Consequently, they used a plenty of lighting equipment and often they blew the fuses of the place when using strobe lighting.
Currently glamour photos are pretty much always taken with digital cameras. Small and medium format. Technical quality has dramatically increased, so now one can shoot a magazine cover with a small compact camera.
Now future of Glamour Photography will be quite interesting. Shall we witness the dawn of 3D technology? Should it be so, then it’s already there. My favorite magazine dealing with Photoshop now publishes a number of articles devoted to 3D rendering. Internet now hosts more and more 3D rendered glamour pictures. Some of my friends on the web who are complete virtual identities and such: they post entirely rendered pictures to Flickr. Well if it isn’t their own virtual beauty galleries! 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.
It’s possible that we glamour photographers will become living anachronisms. Glamour photographers, be alarmed just dont panic! Personally, I trust in what I do. Just as painting and film have survived, there will always be a huge demand for digital glamour images, made with a DSLR, inspiration, fine lighting and much love.
