Sue Bryce inspired

For over three days and nights I watched Sue Bryce talk about how she captures stunning glamour style portraits in Australia.

I have been worrying for a while about a self portrait assignment that I have to do, before I get to meet another famous Australian photographer, Barb Uil. There are 14 of us in my workshop. People are flying in from all over Europe. Everyone, but me is a professional photographer .

No pressure them !!!!

A few people were obviously worrying like me about what they could come up with. I had lots of different ideas, but I kept putting it off. When I saw how simple Sues techniques were. I thought I could easily do that.

Sue works with a make up artist, who turns her frumpy subjects into glowing better examples of themselves. Well, as it happens I am a make up artist. I have many strings to my bow. I have oodles of makeup from my old days working with YSL and Dior. In fact I recently made up two friends for a Burlesque ball they were going to.

So in the shower I jumped. Styled my hair with a bit of curl, so it looked different to my norm, and some subtle makeup. Voila. I looked a better example of my normal day to day look. ( my I can’t be bothered look )

Here’s what I came up with.

I also shared these on Facebook and got the typical comment “ What a great camera, Karen “ ergh no, it’s an entry level DSLR. Nothing great about it at all. I did have a great lens on my camera, but essentially it was the techniques Sue Bryce shared and my abilities with my camera that got the shots. Look at the image above. I am lying on a white sheet with a white board below me. I have a reflector to my right and a muslin curtain diffusing the window light.

Also people were saying I was massively Photoshopped, which I really wasn’t. I purposely overexposed my face. I tend to like that look, and it is more flattering to old dears like me. In fact I normally really soften the faces of my more mature subjects. Just letting their wrinkles show through slightly. But I didn’t use this technique at all on my face. My main problems was trying to get rid of the dominate brass bed in the background.

In fact because of my weight gain and that most of my shots are full face, straight on, I looked like a fat chipmunk. If I had great Photoshop skills, that would have been the first thing I would have changed.

  I knew that 14 amazing pros were going to be judging my photography and editing skills. So I didn’t want to embarrass myself, when they met me in person. I think I am yet again the oldest to be on the workshop. So it could have been a fright for them to see the real me in May.

I’m not to happy with the colour in these shots. I am having problems with what I see in Elements and then what it looks like in Picasa. I calibrated my monitor , but I think the problem lays with a recent change to my way of working. Hubby changed it so that I could see two different things on the two monitors I work  from. Great for multi tasking, which I love to do. But it’s only since we did this , that I have noticed the big difference when I edit.