The Barbie Syndrome

I don't know about many of you, but I look at a lot of pretty girl images that other shooters post on forums and elsewhere-- Some of them are great images, some of them are extremely artless and unskilled, and a lot of them fall somewhere in between; my own included.

For the most part, images I personally rate abysmally low on the quality scale are generally the results of poor photography skills, poor processing skills, and, often, both. The criteria I use when assessing the quality of pretty girl pics are too many to list and many of them are, I'll admit, fairly subjective. But one of the big ones is what I call The Barbie Syndrome.

The Barbie Syndrome is easy to spot: Photographers, usually through post-processing techniques, utilize skin-processing tools that are so over-applied the model's skin ceases to look remotely lifelike. In other words, it looks plastic, synthetic, and very much like the artificial skin of a Barbie doll. The usual suspect? Photoshop's "Gaussian Blur" tool.

Obviously, glamour images (as well as many fashion and beauty images) seek to create a certain level of fantasy and illusion. But it's the level of fantasy and illusion that can make or break an image. Initially, a good MUA goes a long way towards creating the illusion. Soft light and aesthetically pleasing shadow also contribute to the fantasy. Finally, post-processing is the icing on the cake.

Really good processing skills require subtlety in their application. The trick is to hide the manipulation of pixels, i.e., to enhance the image by creating an end-result that looks great without looking artificial. Unfortunately, this isn't always so easy to accomplish and requires greater skill to pull off.

There are many techniques and tools that are designed to help photographers accomplish fantasy and illusion -- as it applies to a model's beauty and allure -- without it appearing fake. There's a term that relates to this: Suspension of disbelief. The term refers to the abilities of viewers (of an image or a movie or whatever) to suspend disbelief in order to go along with what the image or movie portrays as reality. When photographers over-use certain processing tools to create beauty and allure, viewers find it more difficult to suspend disbelief and, as a result, simply don't buy into the model's (phoney) physical attributes; attributes like perfect, porcelain, plastic, skin.

My best advice is to use these post-processing tools discriminately and subtlely. If the results of your processing applications seem artificial to you, I guarantee they'll seem artificial to others. I'm not coming down on tools like "Gaussian Blur." That particular tool can be a fantastic part of your pretty girl processing arsenal. The level in which you apply it, however, can be your worst enemy. BTW, I suggest you always apply this tool in a separate layer. And don't forget there's also an opacity slider that allows you to control the amount of blur that is effecting your image. I am definitely a practitioner of fantasy and illusion but within certain constraints. (Sometimes I practice fantasy and delusion, but that's another, more personal, story.) The bottom line is that less, or the appearance of less, is often more when it comes to post-processing. Let's make pictures of beautiful, sexy women, not beautiful, sexy Barbie dolls.

I finally managed to add a few pics to this post as blogger-dot-com's file upload utility is again working, albeit, barely working. Boy, they've been having a lot of technical difficulties lately! Anyway, the pics are of Nautica who has naturally creamy skin and requires little in the way of Barbie-fication.

Below is a behind-the-scenes shot for you BTS aficionados. I captured this set of Nautica with a Canon 5D w/85mm f/1.8 prime, ISO 100, f/5.6 @ 125th. Sorry if I've posted these before. There's no easy way to go back and look at the images I've posted in the past. Knowing what pics I've posted is mostly guesswork and reliance on my memory which, sometimes, isn't as reliable in these matters as I'd like it to be.