Grace chatting with Anna on Thakoon’s front row… such an inspirational fashion moment, I couldn’t resist!
Flare in photographs is a matter of taste. A lot of photographers – fashion bloggers in particular – purposely create flare for aesthetic reasons. Some bloggers (who shall remain nameless) overdo the flare to an annoying level (like, every image in every post…) where the images are so washed-out you can no longer even see the subject matter. I like to get just a touch of rainbows in some of my images if the sun is easy to work with that day. If you watch Breaking Bad closely, you’ll see that the cinematographers use flare whenever they can too.
Since I normally shoot with a compact lens it was great using my friend Andrea’s 75-200mm Nikon the day I photographed her for Blonde Bedhead. Click here to see how differently the flare is refracted in a longer lens compared to the flare generated by my shorter lens in Kristen’s photo above.
Usually when I post a photo of a man, the comments either criticize how A) boring or B) crazy/outlandish he looks. I am starting to feel like I can’t win. And by extension, that men can’t win at fashion.
I present to you this photo of Ian, whose photo I originally didn’t post because the shots are slightly out of focus. I took this photo the first day I ever took my Canon 60D out, so that’s a cool piece of random trivia. Ian looked good enough for me to photograph him though. Admittedly I still don’t entirely comprehend male fashion – and what good men’s fashion looks like – and therefore I offer Ian’s picture as a sort of mea culpa.
My favorite male fashion bloggers’ outfits look nothing like the designs worn on men who walk the catwalks at the men’s RTW collections. It’s more like there’s a standard American guys’ look, and the only thing that changes from season-to-season are the proportions and color, and even then only slightly. That’s what confuses me. Women aspire to look like the supermodels on the runway, but it doesn’t seem to work that way with guys. I never see young fashionable guys in Chicago rocking skirts (a la Rick Owens) or pastel-on-pastel (a la Versace). In contrast, you can quite clearly see the trickle-down effect that the designer collections have on womenswear all the way from Barneys to Forever21. I’m never going to get men’s fashion so I’m just going to let my readers (and your comments) guide my understanding.