In the Pixar movie Finding Nemo one of the characters is a shark named Bruce in a 12-step program. Bruce has extremely dangerous looking teeth, and clearly has an appetite for fish. In a meeting of his 12-step program Bruce loudly chants, “Fish are friends, not food” in an Australian accent—although if I were a smaller fish I wouldn’t want to tempt this particular shark by getting too close!

Jade © Harold Davis

I try to keep a mantra similar to Bruce’s in mind when I photograph models. Models are people, not things. If one takes the time to get to know the person behind the model facade even a bit, the results can be inspiring. After all, people have character, and capturing this character is an important part of what model photography is about—even (or particularly) when the camera is pointed at a subject who is model and is a beautiful woman.

A case in point is the shot of the beautiful model Jade, shown above. Jade is best known for her fetish look. You can visit her website by clicking here. When I shot Jade as a person I was pleased to get a somewhat different look: personal, playful, and somewhat sexy but without the hard edges seen in most of the photos of her.

Repeat after me, models are people—not things!

Click here to see the models category on my blog, and here to see a gallery of my model photography.

Gabriella, photo by Harold Davis.

I think this shot of Gabriella was a little too bright and contrasty because the soft box was dialed up too much and a bit too close to her face—on the right side of the image you see here. But looking at the RAW file, I liked the way this high key portrait showed the lines in her face, making it almost like a mask. So I processed the photo to emphasize this effect, essentially desaturating it then adding back in selective color in the eyes, lips, a bit of blush on her cheek, and some color in the hair line. One more take on virtual, digital make-up!

Kirsten, photo by Harold Davis.

Briefly noted: Kirsten has a mischievous twinkle in her lovely eyes. As soon as I saw her I knew I wanted to make a portrait that did her justice. Her eyes, of course, would anchor the portrait, ever so nicely framed by the saucy twist in her hair. Mischievous twinkle or not, I think there’s a veiled curtain of sadness that lurks behind the sense of humour and beauty Kirsten shows the world.

For some of my thoughts about making portraits, and some portraiture techniques, check out my new book Creative Portraits: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques.

Silver and Gold, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This shot of two models in metallic body paint didn’t seem to present any particular post-processing difficulties. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. A close-up view of the shot on my 30 inch wide monitor showed a band-aid under the gold paint on one gold finger. When a photo is as graphically simple as this one, the flaw would have spoiled the show.

Phyllis gave me a hand with the retouching, which used the skin from an undamaged finger rotated, resized, and warped to replace the fiber of the wrapped bandage. I bet you can’t tell which finger was fixed using this virtual plastic surgery!

Edit: Over on Flickr, I had some incorrect guesses about which finger was fake. It took quite a while for Marty to “finger” the index finger on the model’s right hand.

I think it is significant that it took a while for someone to point out the faked finger, after all there are only ten possibilities. It’s almost like a kind of visual Turing test. Apparently, sophisticated viewers of a photo can’t tell which part was digitally created and which part was captured directly by the camera.

The moral: don’t take the reality of anything you see in a photo for granted.

Here’s a close-up of the hand in the photo before the bandaid was retouched out: