Roseena

I recently had the pleasure of photographing a fantastic model from the west coast of Ireland, Roseena McNair, who was visiting the Isle of Man for a couple of days. Roseena has a beautiful natural look and wore no makeup at all. I’ve done no skin retouching, whatsoever.
I see the work of photographers whose models have the appearance of having been dipped in wax; they have a kind of Madame Tussaud’s look to them. When confronted, they’ll insist that the featureless skin is down to ‘clever lighting’ or ‘a great makeup artist, when it’s pitifully obvious they’ve used neither. And it’s not ‘High Fashion’ either – retouchers working on actual High Fashion images spend hours, sometimes days working on files, not a few minutes with the skin smoothing brush in Lightroom. What it is is vanity by proxy.
When you overly retouch and alter an image of someone, you may as well be saying to them, “Thanks for posing for me, but I don’t actually like how you look, so I’ve removed every line, freckle, mole and skin pore from your face and made you look like a cartoon…Here are the photos. I hope you like them!”