Here’s our second try at getting a photo story down while also working on developing a style for shooting “fashion-in-context”. Too many shoe sites in Korea – and on the web in general – don’t put shoes in a real context from which to see the shoe – I am striving to make a place where the shoe becomes the central part of the photo story, in a way that is both dynamic and believable, as opposed to feeling set-up or commercial.

Remember that this is just a test, just a dress rehearsal in which we are getting all the parts together.

Remember, click on any pic to enlarge it to huge proportions.

The “concept” that drives this photo story – just as something around which to build pictures – is that of “taking the train” to visit perhaps a boyfriend or other acquaintance for whom she wants to dress up just a bit. Hokey, I know, but it’s something to build a visual storyline around.

Frankly, I prefer shooting at night, where you can get some nice mixed lighting effects and motion blur, but daytime does offer a lot more light, obviously, and a fresher feel. Everything can’t be dark and sultry, and we have to be able to show shoes in many different kinds of contexts.

Also, I chose to have her use the same shoes as in the previous test session with Sugar, to provide consistency and a point of comparison. I don’t find the shoes especially attractive, but that’s actually some of the challenge of the exercise itself, right?

So we chose to have our model – remember Long as Sin? – come in to Seoul Station in her normal clothes (I had her wear a mini-skirt) and simply go through the motions in order, as if she were simply going to meet her boyfriend in another city. So of course, we have to have her change shoes, right?

It’s just the iconic shot that can’t be done without. On your left, I made sure to capture the “insert” shot right before the foot entered the shoe, which is where you’ll see a lot of fashion magazines catching that moment, along with the standard pigeon-toed sitting stance (which is a natural one to assume, by the way, if you’re going to be be putting on heels) in which the woman is adjusting her ankle strap or some such thing. The picture over here on the right side of the page is interesting because you get each shoe on either foot, with the feminine, knock-kneed stance that is as much as a function of making sure of keeping prying eyes from seeing anything they shouldn’t as any natural sitting stance for women sitting in heels. Considering that I was snapping away at a low angle, such was a natural stance to assume. In either case, it was very photogenic and a stance that Long as Sin seemed to enjoy.

Here is the final shot, and a potentially awkward one for the model. Now she has nothing to “do” – no task to accomplish, nothing to do with her hands, and it’s just her being left to assuming poses and being quite aware that she is being photographed. This can be quite unnerving for the shyer, first-time model, as was the case here.

So I directed her to play with her phone, to act like she was receiving or sending messages. This was the moment when she truly started to get into the modeling, as she started posing a bit, adjusting here and there, but I could see that she was considerably more shy and uncomfortable than Sugar in her first modeling set, who in retrospect, was quite comfortable and happy to pose for the camera.

So I used the fact that she was basically able to think of and assume a single pose to my advantage. I wanted to try and get different angles on her, and I started consciously using shots I had seen in both fashion and fetish magazines and sites. The first shot below is a standard high shot that places the viewer in position of power and the subject in one of apparent domination.

For those of you who haven’t studies Semiotics in a marketing or design track, let me tell you that there is nothing accidental or unplanned about the shots and symbols used in the advertisements that you see. Every angle, every element, every pose is meticulously planned and executed. While shooting the picture of the model below adjusting her strap, this was obvious.

There were several shots of each of all of the pictures, but there is an alternate one of the below left picture with the model looking up slightly and smiling which was just too risqué to use. Her face was still appropriately covered by her hair, but the picture being shot at obvious waist-height and at the level of her mouth was too much to use. As it was, I used the shot of her looking down, which made for a totally different mood.

I then took a cue from some of the Japanese (and other) foot fetish sites I’ve seen, which are places that obviously do fetish photography well, i.e. they are good at making shots that include whole-body poses, but accentuate certain parts of the body quite powerfully, usually with a wide-angle lens. The shot to the upper right is an example of a standard shot that might accentuate the foot. It does the job OK.

But the one here is just stunning. It’s the same lens, except I got down on my stomach on the ground to get the shot, while the rest of her body is appropriately out-of-focus, with the effect being that the body part becomes something unto itself, which the user becomes almost a separate entity, watching you from a distance watching her nearly-disembodied body part. It’s a powerful fetish photography technique.

I do want to take note here of the condition of the model’s foot. I regret that she wasn’t nearly as pedicured as she had been in the summer, when I first ran across her – had she had all of that dry and dead skin removes, and her nails done properly (not the standard big-toe-only special popular amongst some Korean women but not acceptable to me), I think things would have turned out nicely.

Well, as I said – a dress rehearsal.

Then i moved to a few standard transitional shots as the model packs up her things in the first of the three shots below, while in the second assuming another brief girly pose, before moving on to walk to the main station in the third.

Here’s a transitional shot that I want to use to emphasize the shift between the two environments, inside and outside.

Now was a chance for a totally new angle, one that’s not very common in the photography I’ve seen – the POV (”point-of-view”) shot. I wanted to get a couple of them to put the viewer in the driver’s seat again.

In the shots previous (especially the “big foot” fetish shot and the high-angle shots), you get a kind of “male gaze” view of the subject. What I was trying to do here was accomplish two very different goals: 1) making the POV clearly the wearer of the shoe, with part of the miniskirt, bag, and even rear shoe visible, but also 2) providing the “male gazer” with a view they’ve never seen before, perhaps even one that’s even disorienting because of its placing him into the view of the woman.

Along the way of satisfying Goal #1, the woman gets to see the shoe as it might look on her foot – kind of a “test drive” – while in going for Goal #2, the man might even get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a woman, perhaps fulfilling a desire to cross-dress or otherwise go over the line with women’s shoes as fetish objects, which – contrary to popular belief about men who so fetishize femaleness as to assume or want to wear certain items – is almost entirely a drive found in heterosexual men, who are the majority of shoe sniffers, panty wearers, or full-blown cross-dressers.

In that respect, I think the shots worked out pretty well, although I will try to take better care to make them come out with more options the next time. I didn’t get quite as many usable shots as I would have liked – I was happy with the first shot, but not so much with any of the other remaining alternates.

One great thing about Seoul Station is the fact that it’s a huge dome of translucent material on the top of the building, with a large glass façade on one side. In other words, if you look at the pictures directly above and below, as the model walks through different parts of the station, there is a very nice balanced lighting effect, as the diffuse light from the top acts as a nice “fill” while the stronger, more directional light from the side acts as the main “key” light.

You’ll notice in the “test drive” shots above, the main light is to the front of her, so it’s almost like a flash effect, with her front being lit strongly and clearly. In the three shots below, as most of the light is directly to her side, you get some nice contrast and shadows as we catch her in the lower angle.

One of the other reasons for doing the series of three series is to offer not just different views of the model walking, but also to shoe the shoes in different views of the same shot – you might notice that the model is presented right leg forward, then in mid-step, then left left leg forward. It’s a little repetitive, but presented in a series, seem to work.

Here’s a shot of her walking into the distance, a rear-shot. I wanted to offer a nice rear view of the shoes, but actually forgot to cover that shot well, so this was one of the few I got. In the future, I do want to emphasize strong rear-angle shots, because this is probably the one view that women get the least chance to see.

I then turned to a new caveat in the story – the brief trip to McDonald’s. It is a plausible part of going to a train station, as well as a good chance to enter another “normal” environment while taking some decidedly not-so-normal pictures. In the end, the “fetish shot” serves both the shoe and fetish viewers well, and if done right, can unite the “gazes” of the fetishizer (the watcher) and the fetishized (the potential wearer).

Here are some accidentally nice shots of the model approaching the fast food area. The auto-focus lense caught the middle of the frame in focus, leaving the model out of focus in both the shots.

I kind of like the effect, which gives the viewer the feeling that she’s just walking past you, an accidental afterthought to the destination we see her going towards. In particular, I like the above right shot, which captures just the right balance of slack and pull in her stride, in which her rear leg is frozen in just that particularly feminine instant that can only exist when walking in somewhat high heels.

And here we have a transitional shot into the fast food mecca that is McDonald’s.

Always need good transitions in any composition, whether they be musical, photographic, prose, or video. Gotta know where we’re going and what we’re leaving. I didn’t feel the need to beat the viewer with it by showing her actually buying a Coke Zero or a bag of french fries – we had more important things to shoot. And I also didn’t want to make the McDonald’s people mad.

The shots below are kind of a mix between transition and some natural environment shots of the shoes in actual action. I can’t think of shoes being any more in real life action than in the back of a well-trodden McDonald’s in a busy train station, but I think the second picture directly below is much more of a “shoes-in-action” shot that the first one below, which it definitely more of a transitional/establishing shot showing us grabbing a seat.

The floor offered the kind of gritty environment that I like to see contrasted with pretty shoes, clothes, and models in an urban setting, because it offers that extra bit of contrast and tension that just isn’t there when you see a feminine figure standing in a ballroom, cocktail lounge, or fancy coffee shop.

The McDonald’s isn’t exactly a shot of a waifish model illuminated by car headlights standing on a NYC street on a rainy night taking a taxi, but I think you get the point.

Here, we now borrow from fetish photography once again. Part of the appeal of certain kinds of fetish shot is the ability to have the camera take you to places you could never go in real life.

How many times has the hot girl with a short skirt sat down next to you, but you felt totally distracted by the desire to look, but the equally felt desire to not come off as a pervert. You want to stare, maybe look at the line of the thighs, calves, ankles, and feet – but you also don’t want to be the “dirty old man” – be that guy. So you politely don’t look and maybe catch a glimpse when you can.

So the fetish shot – the true fetish shot, not some “foot porn” site that has nothing to do with real fetish-as-sexualized-object, not as a mere object-auxilary-to-sex – takes us to angles and positions we would never even dream of in reality, of angles that are impossible to take, of positions that are socially unacceptable to take.

How long do you think it would take before you ended up with security leading you out of the building if you tried to go for the shot below?

Whoa! I was only able to get this angle with the camera nearly on the floor and me shooting “hail Mary” style up at her legs. You also need to have a wide-angle lens.

I swear that I did nothing to purposely accentuate the pole – it was a piece of phallic symbolism that just happened to be there, especially when taking a low-angle shot of a girl sitting a fast-food table. Actually, it was pretty useful, since we didn’t have to worry about how to cover up her more sensitive areas. It makes for a striking picture and also another close shot of the shoes.

Here, we’re truly getting into the aesthetic of the “fetish shot.” I like how we get in close and inspect how the shoe looks on the foot from the side (above), as well as from a slightly more diagonal view (below).

I like the slight overexposure of the flash in the final shot; it provides a kind of clinical sharpness that will be pleasant in the future, especially when we have a primped and pedicured model in a full photo shoot.

We round out our MacAttack session with a trip to the trashcan, which I could do without, frankly, but it does show her in action, in motion, as well as from behind.

Overall, I think the session went well and I came away with some new kinds of pics I hadn’t really taken before, and that was important to me in trying to develop my own chops as the main photographer on this project.

I am also getting better at fusing fashion and fetish photography, which is good, since I think they’re not all that far off from each other. It’s just a matter of soft-focus filters and purposes.

In the end, I think “fetish” is a pretty misunderstood and misapplied word. In the end, a woman obsessed with high heel shoes as sexualized objects, with adorning her feet, occasionally taking pictures of them to send to her friends, or obsessing about all kinds of high heel shoes, is engaged in the same fetish as the men who gaze at those high heels as sexualized objects, picture of feet, or obsessing over all kinds of high heel shoes.

They’re flip sides of the very same coin, except separated by the fact of one person being the fetishizee, versus being the watcher from afar.

Below is a series of shots that are interesting because of the silhouette effect of the lighting, as opposed to having any real meaning in the series itself.

And here’s a couple shots of her making her “final” walk off to the train.

And here’s the end of the photo essay.

Well, almost. Here’s the imaginary coda, in which our intrepid model comes back from out of town, coming back to Seoul Station, where she has to change back into comfortable mode in order to go down and take a taxi back home.

Walking out of the station, with right, mid-stride, and left foot forward positions well represented.

Here’s a somewhat hokey-looking shot – but effective, nonetheless – done at a low angle, one which would appeal to almost any passersby.

Nice mouse-eye-view of her descending the stairs.

The shots here are just iconic, is the stuff we’d like to see, with several shots of shoes-waaaaay-in-context. Getting in and out of taxis and stuff – I’m still trying to develop my technique for making that look good. My hunch is that it looks better at night.

A great pose.

Cool shot.

The shoot’s almost over, and our 40 minutes of doing it are almost over.

Fantasy’s over – a shot with the model and the shoes.

Good job, fair model! 수고했어요!