Bodypainting with Antoine Tyce (nudity)

[Franglais]

6-hour course from last Sunday with Antoine Tyce at ITIS.

Applying the make-up takes ages so we actually did the pictures in four stages

1. Backstage preparation
2. Face
3. Face+Torso
4. Full body

During the long intervals between each stage Antoine showed us how to rework the images in Photoshop and Lightroom. He makes it look so easy but it's not.

All pictures by D200 which is becoming outdated fast. The lighting is now set for 200 ISO which means I have to set 200 ISO on the D200 to get enough depth-of-field and I'm getting noise. When I remove skin blemishes the retouched part has no noise and stands out slightly.

[jetrim]

As always, beautiful stuff Charles! This is some top notch work from the make up artist as well. I tend to shy away from body paint requests because there are so few artists that can actually pull off a good body paint job (that and sitting around for 5 hours!)

[Franglais]

As always, beautiful stuff Charles! This is some top notch work from the make up artist as well. I tend to shy away from body paint requests because there are so few artists that can actually pull off a good body paint job (that and sitting around for 5 hours!)

That's exactly what Antoine said. He made sure that we had someone who really knew how to do it - Karen Savard (www.karen-savard.book.fr).

In fact some of these photos might even be by Karen. I lent her the D200 a couple of times then discovered I couldn't tell which were hers and which were mine. There were 5 photographers present and we all tended to do the same picture. The model is only painted on the front plus the light is pretty directional. No question of sneaking round the side for a different view. We were all in a line in the center with me usually at the back (greater reach of the 18-200 allows me to stand 10 feet away.)

[daq7]

Very cool. Man would I love to tone map those

[Franglais]

Very cool. Man would I love to tone map those

CONGRATULATIONS! That's 2000 posts for you. But back to the subject -

What's tone mapping?

BTW there's already some Photoshop work done on the images, basically to remove imperfections. Stuff like - make sure the skin colour is uniform all over. Lena's forearms are redder than the rest, but I haven't figured out the reversed-calque method he used.
Antoine checks up afterwards and tells us off if we don't do it right..

[daq7]

They are brilliant. Tone mapping is software that pulls details out of multiple exposures to create super real effects. Or totally unreal depending on how you do it. It could enhance colors and textures in this in ways that I like but you may definitely not. My only point is that the base material here is very very nice.

[Grandpaw]

Great job Charles! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: I have always liked photography and have never been interested in taking up painting but this looks like something that might get me to buy some brushes and paint, :blush2: Jeff

[Franglais]

Same rules as usual - the only person who has the right to touch the model is the make-up girl. She came along with a table full of material, plus a cloth to protect the floor which had been whitewashed that morning.

It attracted an atypical crowd.

- nobody I had ever met before
- two women photographers including one with a Sony Alpha (needed a special remote control)
- a guy with a new Pentax K5. It took ages to figure out how to turn off the auto-ISO
- no Canon shooters. Usually the Canon and Nikon fans are about equal, jostling one another for a good spot in the center

We were in the white studio but after a while we put down the black background which I prefer anyway. We started off with a Bol-de-beauté for the head shots (the thing you can see above the woman's head in the last picture) but switched over to softboxes when we had to illuminate most of her body

[livin4lax09]

bodypainting blows my mind, I love it. However, very often all the attention is to the painting aspect and very little detail is paid to how it is photographed, whereas yours are well composed even when ignoring the bodypaint. I especially like that third shot.

[Franglais]

...whereas yours are well composed even when ignoring the bodypaint. I especially like that third shot.

Thanks. You didn't see the one immediately after the third shot where I zoomed in a bit too much, cut off half her fingers and had Antoine moan at me when I showed it to him.

I did more than 150 pictures that day. Each pose was fairly static so there was time to explore the framing possibilities and choose the best afterwards (I never crop).