Glamour photos do not do people the same justice that candid photos do.

[Mister_Rik]

@msmith537

Maxim and other magazines like my GFs InStyle are heavily Photoshopped. To the point that the subjects no longer look like people but more like featureless cartoon characters.

I’ve mentioned this here before, but my favorite example of this was a Vogue cover featuring Keira Knightley. I personally think Keira is one of the most stunningly beautiful women in the world, and a big part of her beauty is the fact that she has a unique, quirky face that stands out from the crowd of “typical” movie stars. Yet I stood at the checkstand next to that Vogue magazine for five minutes before I realized it was her on the cover. They had Photoshopped her into a clone of everybody else who shows up on their cover, airbrushing out everything that made her face unique.

I also read a report that said she was quite irate when she saw they’d digitally increased the size of her breasts on the King Arthur movie poster.

@NDP

Which brings me to another factor that influences how the photograph comes out: the woman herself. This has little–if anything–to do with the actress or model’s physical attractiveness but rather with how well they can “work the camera.” Modeling is often correctly considered to be a fairly vacuous profession but that’s not to say there are not some skills the best models (or actresses who do a lot of photo-shoot work) use to convey expressiveness without it looking fake or overly posed.

God yes. I’ve subscribed to a lot of modeling sites (and, erm, obtained much other such content from Usenet), and it’s interesting to note that the prettiest models with the best bodies are not always the most popular. There are a lot of models who, physically, are “Plain Janes”, but they’re extremely popular because they have a knack for “working the camera”. They smile a lot, they know how to pose “just right” to tease the viewer, and perhaps most importantly, they look like they’re having fun.

Meanwhile, too many of the really gorgeous girls appear to think that being pretty is enough, and the photo sets are just … boring. I recall one young British model who was very very pretty and had a fantastic figure, but after viewing a few hundred photos of her I came to the conclusion that she had exactly one facial expression in her repertoire. Her photo sets each contained about 100 photos, and it seemed every set consisted of the same sequence of poses, usually with a couple dozen photos in a row that were simply extremely minor variations on the same pose. I just don’t know how much of this to blame on the photographer and how much to blame on the model.

[Giles]

@gaffa

Huh? No processing is needed to throw the background out of focus, just the right lens and a skilled photographer. I’m sure this image looks as it did when the film was developed.

I agree, except that it doesn’t require a highly skilled photographer: just a telephoto lens (e.g. 100mm to 200mm on a 35mm camera) and a fairly low f stop (e.g., 2.8 or 4). It’s a pretty standard technique.

[Irishman]

I echo the thanks for the Marilyn pictures. Nice to see something besides the icon.

As for the OP, I will go so far as to say that every regular woman (as opposed to celebrities) I’ve seen who gets “Glamour Shots” done looks better in normal pictures or regular everyday makeup. I haven’t seen a single “Glamour Shot” that I liked.

Regarding magazine covers, I really did see a Cher cover where she looked like a flat cardboard cutout. That trend is starting to annoy me. I glance at magazine covers while waiting in line, and sometimes don’t recognize the actresses/models until I read their name.