I’m really running out of title ideas, sorry. But this poorly-titled blog post is brought to you by my RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 8 obsession, Acid Betty:

Gee, I don’t know what it is about her that fascinates me…

Betty is a controversial queen, because she’s really playing up her bitchy side for the cameras and the editing is responding by presenting her as the villain of the show; it happens every season and usually I cannot stand the girl who gets the ‘bitch edit.’ But Betty’s look is right up my alley, and when she presented this look for the Oscars Runway challenge I had to pledge her my allegiance for the season:

I LIVE
It’s also easier to love her because she is clearly PLAYING at being a bitch and not just behaving that way by accident; it’s a role she’s been sharpening for years in NYC, but the reality show audience is interpreting her as overly harsh. Whatever. My beloved Pearl from Season 7 was a controversial queen too, but ultimately it’s the look that wins my heart, and Pearl and Acid both have mine in spite of whatever shortcomings might get highlighted by a reality show. Rumor is that Betty doesn’t make it much farther in the competition, though, and that is going to seriously bum me out if it’s true – usually the queens I favor go far in the competition so I will hate it if this time my idol sashays away too soon. But, there is a hell of a lot of good talent on the show this year and plenty of other queens to root for if this is the case. Moving on.

I’m also bummed because I have to  travel tomorrow for a work conference; sure, the destination is San Diego, CA, which is great, but still, there’s the traveling part to deal with, and I hate that. I don’t like flying in spite of how much I love airplanes; it’s not that I am at all afraid to fly (and in fact I actually quite like that part of it) but I hate dealing with airports, meeting deadlines, and most of all I hate packing. The day before a flight I always go into a complete panic, feeling like I am not prepared to travel at all and going shopping at CVS to buy as many tiny bottles of things as I can find, making list after list and double-checking everything out of fear I am going to leave something behind, or get to my destination only to realize that I packed the wrong shoes or am in a climate with dry, cold wind that leaves my lips parched and in need of the Blistex I forgot to bring. This is completely illogical, of course, because unless one is traveling to a remote location boots and Blistex can be purchased in any number of stores, but there it is. I panic nonetheless. I think it has to do, psychologically, with my need for safety, routine, and familiarity; I have a very CERTAIN WAY I like my mundane daily activities to proceed, and when in another location far from home I am thrown off completely. I unpack and immediately realize I don’t want to wear ANY  of the outfits I brought to wear (especially if someone with whom I am traveling brought clothes that look better than mine do; yeah, I’m that vain). I realize I should have brought a comfy pillow since the hotel ones are cheap, or that I really would like to have the flat iron with the 1.5″ barrel instead of the 1″ one I brought along. In short, I am high maintenance, and traveling just ain’t my thing. But off I go anyway.

Praying I bring the right flat-iron

This past week I worked more with Portrait Pro on the photos I was able to take over Spring Break, and on occasion I continue to use too much skin softening and coming out looking a little plastic. That happened in this case, so I did my usual and added a bunch of texture and overlays to hopefully disguise it a little bit. It’s funny, because clearly I don’t care if people know I edit the hell out of my photos for effect – my face shape, nose, and eyes in particular are completely re-created here – but when I overdo the skin smoothing it reads ‘phony’ to me. And the reason why I end up overdoing it so much is pretty silly too: after sharpening the photo (which is generally the last step) I can magnify the photo to full-size (which is freaking HUGE) and see all sorts of flaws in the skin that the sharpening accentuates, and it bugs me so badly I have to go back and re-soften all the big pores, fine wrinkles, and color inconsistencies that you really can only see if you magnify the hell out of the photo – AS IF ANYONE BUT ME EVER DOES THAT. No one, and I mean NO ONE is blowing my photos up to full size to look at my pores or messed-up makeup application aside from me, and yet I do it every time and obsessively correct all the errors anyway. And there’s the rub: it’s the little lines and flaws that add depth to the face, so when I edit those all away the end result is a face that looks like it’s been sculpted out of butter. I do a better job than most at keeping the texture and sharpness of everything else without going overboard, but try as I might I just CANNOT leave the skin alone. Some day I’ll learn.

Another new feature I’ve tried out a few times with Portrait Pro is the hair-coloring feature – in the photo above, the wig I’m wearing is actually black with dark auburn highlighting in the front (it’s the same wig as the second photo posted here), and in the one below my hair was actually a highlighted blonde (it’s the wig from this video review):

The software does a pretty damn good job with changing haircolor and maintaining the texture of the hair, if you do it right and have time to play around with it, at least. It’s all so much fun and gives me hours of entertainment; I remember when I was a kid how much I loved to turn the ‘tint’ knob on the television while watching ice skating, because the skaters’ dress colors would change (yes, I am old enough to remember when there was a ‘tint’ knob on televisions, and I was weird enough to actually spend hours doing this). That’s kind of what it’s like to play around with changing my makeup and hair color in Photoshop (I also used to use markers to re-color all the makeup on the models in the JC Penney catalog when we got it in the mail, so I’ve been strangely entertained by stuff like this for awhile). Speaking of re-coloring my makeup – in this shot I was originally wearing bright orange lipstick that really looked horrible on me (I can pull the orange off, but not while wearing watered-down colors like peach and ash blonde) and another fun side note is that the peach top is actually a cardigan, and to use it in these photos I put it on backwards – something I do quite a bit if I really want some of what I am wearing to show in a portrait (see this collage for other examples, all three portraits were taken with a shirt or dress on backwards).

OK now, I know this photo is over-edited all to hell (especially  based on all the comments it got on Flickr which pointed this out, albeit in a good-natured manner) and yet, I think it really works. I don’t know who I look like here, it’s someone I can’t place right now but it’s definitely not me; I really liked how I was able to bring out (i.e. totally fabricate) the peachiness of the skin and makeup and man, in spite of its flaws that wig takes BEAUTIFUL photos. I hope my friend Lana can doctor it up and wear the hell out of it, because it is lovely.

After over-editing the skin and thinking it looked too flawless (no, I did not wake up like this) I tried out a black and white version, but in the end decided to stick with the color, as I usually do since color is my THING.

It’s quite interesting to work this closely with my face and learn what tweaks I feel take me from perfectly acceptable to fabulous; I always widen the distance between my eyes because they are a little close-set, and I definitely do slim down my nose, even though my original nose isn’t a feature that has ever bothered me – it’s just more visually appealing when it’s a touch thinner. I also mess with face shape a bit; I usually prefer to shorten and slim my chin a little and widen my brow, making my face more heart-shape than oval, and even though I already have a nice neck (length-wise anyway; age-wise it’s seen better days, but COME THRU Photoshop and it’s all good), I tend to go ahead and make it longer anyway since for a portrait it’s more appealing. My cheekbones are pretty good, and I’m good at using contour to add depth to them anyway, so I don’t have to do much there; and then I go to town playing around with color, completely changing my makeup shades and usually doing something to change the color of my eyes. And yes, in the first photo shared here I made one eye blue and one brown, just because.

Honestly, the main thing that I feel I would change about my face if I could isn’t possible through plastic surgery, which is widening the distance between my eyes. With glasses on they can easily look even MORE close-set, which is why I am so particular about the size of the frames I will wear. But you can’t go to a plastic surgeon and ask him or her to MOVE YOUR EYES TO A DIFFERENT LOCATION ON YOUR FACE, and if you do and the surgeon agrees, please run away quickly and save yourself. So, Portrait Pro and makeup tricks it is. Moving on.

Two more I messed around with this week; I’m OK with these two, but they’re not thrilling, so I don’t have much to say about them. The cloth over my face in the second photo is just a shirt I was flinging about for the hell of it, and believe it or not I captured this shot without trying at all to frame my face with it; the top just flew up that way as the camera went off, so I thought that was pretty cool.

It’s past 9 PM here and I need to get my butt to bed so I can wake up at 4:45 to make my flight, so I’ll leave you with this last shot, which is one I really like; one thing it makes me think to mention is that the Portrait Pro software really only works in shots where the face is looking directly into the camera. The program uses adjustable placement points to determine where the features of the face are, so when the face is in profile or greatly off-center it just starts guessing where the eyes are, or the nose, or whatever. The result of this can be amusing, but unattractive, so I’ve learned by now to use PP sparingly in shots where the face isn’t basically head-on. I used it to shorten my chin, slim my nose, and touch up my lips a little here, and that’s it – but, because the software insists on finding TWO eyes even when there is only one showing, before I edited it out there was a random, misshapen, floating eyeball hanging out in my hair, complete with wonky eyebrow. It was amusing, and I should have saved a copy of it that way for posterity, but I did not. So here she is, without the hairy eyeball, and with this I will say good day, until next time:

Yep, it’s the backwards cardigan again. And you can see some of the wonky wig hairs at the crown that I mention in my video review, too. But other than that, it’s a lovely wig.

Once again I have to say I’ve been way too busy to type up blog posts, so there it is. And here’s a new one, since although I can barely believe it, Spring Break is here and I have a week off. It feels like we’ve just barely gotten past January, but it’s mid-March already and the school year is zooming by quickly. It’s been a tough year in many ways, some of which I’ve written about on my private blog, and some I’ve yet to share because I’m still processing it all. But for those of you who follow me there, that big old blog post of crazy will be going up soon.

For everyone else, there are more wig videos to come (have two more arriving tomorrow) and a few new photos to share. I finally got a chance to dress up and shoot the last Saturday, so I’ve worked on a few since then and will continue to work on more. I haven’t taken real photos since December, so it’s been awhile. I also worked over some old shots back in February when I didn’t have anything new to edit:

I’m still playing around with the Portrait Pro software I bought recently, and it’s a real blast. I over-do it a lot, but I’m learning how to apply the effects with a softer hand – although on occasion I still do too much and the photo comes out looking way more edited than I’d like. In those cases I usually just add some texture or surface effects to disguise the over-smoothed skin (which is my biggest downfall).

For my last set, I also played around with lighting a lot, which was great fun, but it means my usual editing techniques don’t work as well, and sometimes the end result isn’t quite what I want. In the photo above, I’d used a softbox to hit my face with more light, which eliminates a lot of soft shadows and small detail from the face. The result is a more ‘high-fashion’ look (in my opinion) which a lot of hard shadows and angular edges, so a face can end up looking a little ‘flat.’ It’s not a bad effect, but it requires different editing, and although I really love that photo it doesn’t look much like a real person. So, I added a texture to it to give it an even more animated feel. Sometimes you gotta go where the photo leads you, after all.

This one worked out better; I wasn’t using the softbox when taking the picture, so you can see how much softer and more dimensional the face looks from the start. Also, in case you’re interested, that dress was actually a mauve color that I edited to look gray; I didn’t really realize it when I chose the dress to go with that wig (I really chose it because I ran out of my usual photography makeup and was trying to find something that would cover me all the way up to my neck; in photos I use makeup on my neck and decollete that’s a different color from what I use on my face to get a good match, but I ran out on the last shoot and forgot to buy more) but when looking over the shots I noticed that the white curls on the wig mimicked, at least to me, the flowery swirls in the lace on the dress, so I wanted to emphasize that more by making the dress the same color as the dark black hair on the wig. Black was a bit too dark, though, because I also wanted some of the shine from the material to show, so I went with a dark grey. The result was a much more unified and interesting photo.

In this shot I was once again using different lighting, but I think I did better at editing the skin even though it’s probably a bit TOO alabaster-looking to be considered real. However, I think that works with the dress and the hair anyway so I’m fine with it. And although the dress color in this shot was also edited, I went with more of a dark blue this time than gray. I’ve also been continuing to mess with the face sculpting controls in Portrait Pro to alter my look; in some shots I still look like me albeit a much better, less-wrinkled version; in others I let Portrait Pro edit me until I was practically unrecognizable. I usually use the program’s pre-sets first and then, if I don’t like what I get, I go back and change things on my own – in this next photo, PP gave me a serious Angelina Jolie/Julia Roberts edit, and who was I to argue with that?

This is another one I shot using the softbox, so again you see how much depth is removed from the face when using it. Also, I thought this shot was going to be impossible to get right, because in the original my face was about 15 different shades (from not having my photography makeup again and improvising with my day to day stuff, which isn’t nearly as heavy in coverage) AND on top of that there was a big shadow on my nose from the hair blowing around that made it look gray. And yet I actually managed to salvage it, albeit with a TON of editing. The wig in this shot, by the way, is the Bennett I reviewed last week. This next one is another one of the wigs I recently reviewed – the Aria by Rene of Paris. It’s a gorgeous color to photograph:

And yep, this is one of those shots I felt I over-edited then added a bunch of texture to try and conceal. My skin looks practically plastic in it, but I love the way the hair is moving and that color – it really can’t be said enough – is unbelievably gorgeous both in photos and in person. And keep in mind that in all of these five new photos, I was wearing the same makeup, and used Portrait Pro to make all the color changes. I can’t say enough about that program, if you love working with portraits it’s the best thing I’ve ever come across for processing.

Coming up soon – more photos, and of course, a few more wig reviews. I still need to film the Soft and Subtle by Gabor (a major disappointment, so stay tuned), a new Kristen by Renau in one of the new Chocolate Collection colors, the Tessa by  Noriko in Butter Pecan-R, and another Robin by Noriko in Harvest Gold (I’ve always wanted to see what a longer wig would look like in that color, and we all know I love Robin). So stay tuned! And for those who follow the private blog, keep an eye out for a new post there, too.

Monday afternoon I decided to shoot some portraits and did a fairly quick makeup job to get some done. But I was terribly bored by the whole process, and less than thrilled with what was coming out of the shoot. So I decided to take my frustration out on my costume and photograph the destruction.

That’s a wig I I cut a big hole in just to play around. Why wear them like normal when you’ve taken 8,000 + photos of yourself in them that way already? I’d also already seriously messed up my makeup by the time I took that shot, which was one of the last ones I took. Here’s a shot of the makeup before I destroyed it:

The eyeshadow was all glitter, but it was a rush job so it wasn’t all that thrilling anyway. And that’s the wig with the hole already cut in, and my real hair sticking out of the top. I actually kinda liked the way it looked when worn like this. One thing I’ve decided I don’t  like, though, is shooting portraits against a white backdrop. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it really does a number on my lighting and makes the colors weak. If nothing else, I need to learn some better lighting techniques when working against white. Working with gray or black backgrounds is easier for the type of portraits I like to shoot; much more dramatic results with better color and contrast. I am not skilled enough to know why, that’s just my observation.

Here’s one more, taken when I decided to rip into the black top I was using and just basically mess with it as much as I could beyond wearing it like, you know, a shirt.

That would be me sticking my head through a sleeve, or attempting to anyway. My husband walked into the office at this point in the shoot and I told him I was attempting to give birth to myself through it, which made sense at the time. I still like the description, as it does rather sum up what I was trying to do. Without getting whiny about it, I’m bored again.

Even though I found the shoot frustrating and didn’t enjoy taking them at the time, I found some nice ones to process, and in looking at them now I’m reminded a lot of the old portraits I used to do, back when my camera was incredibly old and I had no lighting or backdrops or costumes or makeup skills, and my lenses were so crappy I couldn’t take anything but portraits (full-length shots were out of the question). Back then, I’d throw on a t-shirt and a wig and grab whatever was nearby and just make it work. And I’d keep shooting until I hit on something interesting, like ripping up a wig or a shirt, and I’d just go town with that idea. Part of the problem is I’ve done it all by this time (including wearing tops the wrong way and ripping up costumes, although ripping up a wig was new) and so I get less excited about doing it again. But some of the photos actually were interesting, so it wasn’t a loss even if I felt unenthusiastic at the time.

I did sign up for an online class to learn how to create composite shots the proper way; as educational an exercise as it may be for me to take a little photoshoot trip back in time, I also need to keep moving forward, and I just can’t get there on my own. I really want to create more whimsical and fantastical stuff, which takes me beyond what I can do here in my studio. I’ve reached a point where, without knowing more, I don’t even want to try, because I don’t want to deal with the frustration of trying to figure it out on my own. So I hope these classes can help with that. In the meantime, I may do more playing around with the simple stuff like I did here. The end results weren’t that bad after all.