female pho­tog­ra­phy & Self Tanner

I’ve been mean­ing to blog about this for about a month now — ever since I edited an image of a GORGEOUS fit­ness model that we shot for her port­fo­lio. One sin­gle image took over an hour to edit, and there was lit­er­ally noth­ing wrong with her body. I spent all that time edit­ing… the very obvi­ous remains of poorly-applied self tan­ner on her hands.

More often than not, female mod­els (and male) with whom we work try to achieve a tan before our shoot. Tanned skin looks healthy, and we have noth­ing against a model with nat­u­rally tanned skin. An appro­pri­ate color of spray tan, done by a pro­fes­sional, usu­ally has a good result as well. How­ever, when a client tries to apply a spray or rub-on tan before a shoot, the result is always dis­as­ter. Yes, always.

I hear the protest from our clients and glam­our mod­els now, “But I use self tan­ner all the time and I know how to do it — it isn’t streaky or blotchy and looks nat­ural!” My answer to that is, Yes, I believe that you can do a good job and that it looks nat­ural.… under nor­mal view­ing con­di­tions. How­ever, being under color-balanced pho­tog­ra­phy lights is NOT nor­mal view­ing con­di­tions. Skin will reflect and absorb light in a pho­to­graph with much starker con­trast than a viewer would see ‘in per­son’. This means that no mat­ter how care­fully you apply self-tanner, the cam­era will see uneven tone, blotches, and areas of unnat­ural color (usu­ally orange). An addi­tional peril of self tan­ner is that the user often chooses the dark­est shade avail­able, which is usu­ally much too dark to look nat­ural. The best spray tan deep­ens and inten­si­fies exist­ing skin color; it doesn’t dra­mat­i­cally change it.

The moral of the story: if you want a tan for your shoot, then start tan­ning (either in the sun or in a salon) well before the shoot, so that you have time to nat­u­rally build color while doing min­i­mal dam­age. Know that even when a sun­burn has faded to the eye, skin will still looked burned in a pho­to­graph — the cam­era is relent­less. If you pre­fer a spray tan, spend the few extra bucks to have it applied by a pro­fes­sional. We know of sev­eral spray tan pro­fes­sion­als, one of whom will do an appli­ca­tion for only $25. And if you insist that you are the one per­son who really, really can do a good job of apply­ing your own tan­ning spray or lotion, then I will allow you to do so… but be pre­pared to pay for exces­sive edit­ing time, because it WILL be nec­es­sary :-p

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