Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

Here's a photo I took that Laura Hollick uses as her profile image. I love that it quickly illustrates her unique style and beauty.

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the last few years, you’ll have been asked at least once to provide a profile picture. Whether you’re surfing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, chatting on instant messaging progams like MSN Live Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, or flirting it up on dating sites like eHarmony, Lavalife, Match.com, you’re going to be encouraged to upload an image to represent you. And why not? Your profile picture is your online face. It has the power to instantly tell the viewer more about you than your name or anything you can write about yourself.

Experts on personal branding say that you should pick one photo and use that consistently to represent yourself online, no matter where you register. I can buy that as a strategy for personal branding, especially for people who are online for professional purposes. Other people treat the profile picture more casually, like an article of clothing or as an accessory that can change with their moods or needs.

I always love it when my friends and clients use the photos I’ve taken of them as their Facebook profile photos. Whether they’re candid snapshots, promotional photos or headshots, it’s an honor to know that I’ve captured something about them that they’re proud to show to the world.

I’m considering creating a photo package for people who want me to make online profile pics for them. In the name of market research, I’ve made a super-sophisticated, mega-scientific little poll about profile pictures. I’d love to have your input. You can check as many answers as you want.

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A few months ago, Laura Hollick and I worked with talented makeup artist and painter Sue Upton to create a photo of Laura taking off with her red bird spirit. In the shoot, we merged Sue’s painting and body-painting skills with Laura’s vision and my photography. It’s always fun to collaborate closely with a team of people who each contribute their own unique skills. I end up learning a lot about what is possible, even when it comes to my own medium of photography.

The process began with some preliminary snapshots to experiment with the poses and the positioning of the painting. Sue then sketched a few different bird designs onto these printouts to get a rough idea of how it was going to look. We wanted to add a branch so that there would be some context to the pose, and so it wouldn’t look like Laura was just floating there in mid-air, but rather stepping off into the unknown with the red bird as her guide. In the sketches below, you can see that Sue used white correction fluid to highlight the best image so that it could be most easily projected onto the backdrop for tracing and then painting.

Painting Laura and the backdrop took hours of meticulous work. The shoot was spread out over two days because we actually shot two completely different poses. Each of the poses required different background and body painting. It was a test of patience and stamina for everyone involved.

The actual photography was quite simple. I wanted good depth of field and even, soft lighting with few shadows. Two Alien Bees B800 flash units set close to their maximum power, modified with brolly boxes provided this bright and diffuse light. I also wanted to stand fairly far back and shoot with as long a focal length as was possible. Laura’s big studio gave me lots of room to do this. All of these techniques were designed to flatten the image so that it would blend Laura with her surroundings as seamlessly as possible.

Here are the final images. What do you think?

Please also read Laura’s fascinating blog post about this shoot.

The lead-up to Valentines Day is boudoir photography season for guys like me. It’s when I’m most often called upon to take “sexy” photos for women. It’s always my goal to produce an image that my client finds sexy, even if she’s doing the photos as a gift for her husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend, life partner, whatever.

That’s why my friend Zura’s recent blog post Sexy vs. skanky or How to photograph sexiness caught my attention. I commented on that post about how I approach photographing sexiness. In this post, I’ve expanded on those comments.

So, the first question that arises is, “What is sexy?” The answer is different for every single person. I can only answer it by discussing it with her, observing her, looking at example images that she brings, etc. to get an idea of what is sexy to her. Then, I can coach that out of her through posing, expression, lighting, wardrobe and mood. We look at the photos as we go along and mutually decide what’s working and what needs adjustment. If she feels that she is coming across as sexy, then she’s more likely to be emotionally committed to the process, and I’d never want to be as arrogant as to unilaterally layer on my own visual language.

Zura’s post compared two advertising posters from the Montreal Metro. One of them showed a woman on silk sheets, with a sort of sleepy come-hither look that Zura found offensive because to her, it says, “I’m not terribly aware of what’s going on right now, maybe it’s a good time to take advantage of me.” In my experience, some women find the half-lidded, sleepy look sexy, and that is their personal expression of sexuality. Some might even find that expression to be empowering because they feel it radiates their sexual power and intent. Because it’s authentic to them, it ends up being inherently sexy. Others are more aggressive, or kinky, or explicit, or any number of flavors of sexuality that personally suit them.

Anyway, I think that first image is mediocre. It’s stiffly posed in order to position and highlight various products that the image is designed to sell, rather than trying to convey an overall message of sexiness. The expression is pasted on the model and doesn’t look natural or particularly authentic. I think it fails just because it is poorly conceived and executed, not because it’s sexist. The second photo is of a woman wearing an elaborate lingerie outfit, standing provocatively and addressing the camera directly with her eyes. To Zura, this communicates, “Hey there tiger, I have some hot ideas about what I’d like to do to you and have done to me, how about it?” I agree that it’s a better photo. However, I believe this photo could be construed as sexist too, because of the obvious Photoshop body modification done around the waist to make it crazy skinny. Some may argue that the woman in the first poster represents a more healthy body image than the woman in the second poster. Personally, I’m not adverse to doing this kind of modification on photos when my client requests it. Photography, particularly the boudoir kind, is illusory anyway, and if she feels it adds to her allure, then why not?

In my opinion, “sexy” and “sexist” aren’t one-size-fits-all. No matter how you shoot something, there will always be people who find it sexy, and there will also be people who are offended. The best approach is to find what is authentic and appealing to their intended audience and go with that.

I’ve included a gallery of my own photos below that I think express a range of various expressions of sexiness.