Must I fear? I'm into beauty photography. I am portraying real life people. I follow a completely digital workflow. Shall I soon become a ridiculous anachronism?

What I wouldn't give to learn where the path of progress will lead Glamour Photos. Then I would definitely inform you about it, my dear reader, in my blog about glamour images. However, it may well turn out that we "knights of light and lens" will be down with our chips. A large portion of our work, probably the second half of the whole process, is nowadays already done digitally in Photoshop. Performing the most important stage of work is still up to us though – I mean the actual shooting. Nevertheless we might soon face the bitter fact that some rendering programs can do it as well.

If we want to get the whole picture though, we really need to reminisce about the past and carefully study the present.

A long time ago glamour art lived only on canvas, painted with care and love, yet existing in this only form. Renowned painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created those paintings: from innocent face portraits to nudes. Cameras dawned just "recently" in terms of world history – in the middle of the 19th century. These were big bulky dry-plate cameras for studio use, which required quite long shutter times. Portraits became popular fast, but the subjects had to sit or stand completely still for quite a long time. In order to help them hold their head, head-clamps were used. Of course, such images were not so glamorous – unless you can appreciate the beauty of a clamped head.

With the development of visual arts and the technical progress it all became simpler. Taking pictures on film was more suitable for the purposes of glamour photography. Glamour pictures were published by a number of magazines. I can recall the Playboy photographer David Mecey talking about the very recent past, in which they had to shoot every Playboy centerfold with large format cameras for quality reasons. This meant that they had to use a ton of light and a lot of times they blew the fuses of the location on which they were shooting when they started to use their strobes.

Nowadays glamour images take full advantage of the digital format. Those range from small to medium. Technical quality has dramatically increased, so now one can shoot a magazine cover with a small compact camera.

Now it's very interesting to forecast the possibilities of the further development for Artistic Glamour Photography. Shall we witness the dawn of 3D technology? Should it be so, then it's already there. One of my favorite magazines on Photoshop now comprises many pieces about various 3D software. There is an increasing number of generated 3D images on the Web. Some of my friends on the Web who are complete virtual identities and such: they post entirely rendered pictures to Flickr. Well if it isn't their own virtual beauty galleries! Surfing on the Internet, it's quite noticeable that many people use specialized 3D software only to make up some feminine, exotic and beautiful models. The generated elf images a lot of times hold all the attributes of glamour images.

So chances are good, that I personally, the guy with the digital camera, am soon be the dinosaur in the field of glamour images. Keep that in mind, fellow artists, but don't despair! However, I believe in what I am doing. Since oil is still so popular, as well as film, I'm sure there will be great interest in beauty photos made with digital cameras, perfect light and enormous dedication.

More On Glamour Images