OhLook wrote in post #18385876
It's common for one's body image to fall behind the actual appearance of one's body as aging occurs. Your bride may well think she looks 10 years younger than she does.
tim wrote in post #18386818Don't do skin smoothing without it being requested. That's mildly offensive to the person. Don't even call it skin smoothing, call it "gentle processing" or something.
In my experience, practically everyone looks better to themselves in a mirror than they do to a camera.
Part of that is optical: Flattening a three-dimensional subject to a 2-D plane always introduces distortion. That's where "the camera adds 10 pounds" comes from. The photographer must correct for that with intelligent choices of distance and focal length, camera angle, and posing.
Another part is not optical, but also caused by the photographer: Unflattering lighting, other aspects of posing and costume, not paying attention to details that become glaring in an image as opposed to what is noticed while "peerin' through a tiny 'ole."
A third part is psychological: When we experience a person in real life, the face is constantly moving, the light is constantly shifting as the face moves, we experience the person in toto--voice, character, et ceter--and we seldom focus on minute facial details. When the image is fixed, those details become much more significant.
The job of the photographer, if he's hired to do a person's portrait, is to make that person look as good in the image as he does to himself in the mirror (this is excepting highly artistic portraits--which has other considerations noted below).
Correcting faults created by the camera or the photographer certainly don't need the client's permission. If you did it, clean up after yourself.
De-emphasizing faults that the camera emphasizes doesn't require permission.
Getting to know the person well enough to understand what needs to be expressed in a portrait doesn't require permission.
I entered portrait photography from painting. As a painter, my goal was to capture my experience of the individual. A painter starts with a blank canvas and adds to the canvas all the elements making up his experience of the individual. What was not part of that experience does not get to the canvas.
As a portrait photographer, it's still my goal to present my experience of the person. To a great degree, I'm fighting the mechanical limitations of the camera, because it knows nothing about "experiencing" a person.
One of my earliest failures in photographic portraiture was a photograph I made of my old Latin teacher, Mrs Shutz. She was a "teacher emeritus"--a woman still teaching long after retirement age. She was gray-haired and heavily wrinkled, but she was one of the most clever, whimsical, witty, and lively people you'd ever meet. She was sharp, but always smiling, with the clearest crystal-blue eyes.
My portrait of her was a miserable failure. It was a picture of an old, wrinkled woman. It was photographically accurate--the camera did its job--but there was nothing of the experience of being in the company of that vibrant woman.
I'd do that much, much better today, and I would not ask permission to do so.
