Hmmm… it looks like I need a new FAIL category in this blog… yesterday evening I had a meeting with some friends from the RLUG community and as all those meetings are best organised around some beers, we went to a pub called Bordello in the Old city of Bucharest (and this is the topic of my post here).

Long story short, the pub is called like that because in the XIX century in its place was a bordello, as the entire neighborhood used to be a light district (destroyed in a fire, rebuilt and such). And to keep the theme, the walls are decorated with vintage erotic photography, which awakened my interest as a photographer: now I think it would be an interesting photography exercise to take in this day some photos that will look like those. And this is going to be yet another source of frustration for me, thus the “FAIL” category, since is not going to be easy to implement.

Basically, those photos are not hard, what you need is logistics:

  • first you need a plumpy model… not fat, just with a bit more meat on her bones, to fit the beauty standards of the era. And good luck finding a plumpy model with enough confidence to pose;
  • then you need some old fashioned clothing, like the sheath your grandma used to wear… this is not as hard as it looks, use the “less is more” approach and you can get the job done with any piece of cloth;
  • accessories: feathers, beads, fans, etc.;
  • background is harder: an old looking chair, maybe a drawer, a bed with baldaquin;
  • for the lighting setup I would have to do a bit of study, but it should not be hard, the photographers of the era didn’t have expensive equipment;
  • the photos should be very soft, slightly unfocused, but not with shallow depth of field. So maybe take them softer directly from the camera or just go sharp and blur it a bit in post-processing, a trivial task;
  • again, in post-processing turn the colors in sepia tones, another easy task.

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