Let me just say this now, loud and clear, for all to hear and remember.
I am a man, man. I don't watch spectator sports, but I like my home theater cranked to "11", I have a beer belly, and I own an XBox. I like movies and video games involving guns, spaceships, and nasty-looking aliens that make gore of mere hu-mans.
And I've been to a "dress cafe." Umm, twice.
So I went to a "dress cafe" with a friend. So what? Don't mean nuthin', man. I'm a photographer, but of the documentary sort and don't often get the chance to practice with models and sets. So I was with a friend, and after we had been talking about my previous trip to the "dress cafe" that I had simply mentioned, in the course of the dinner conversation, existed. Being the girlish ham that my friend Sunyeong is, who stiffened up in her chair and clapped her hands together excitedly exclaiming, "Ooh! Let's go!" a return trip was guaranteed. "Now?" I asked? Yeah now, she nodded with mock severity. With that, we were off, directly. With her, I knew it'd be a fun trip and a chance for me to work out some more photo skills.
As I said, I had been to the cafe with friends a couple weeks prior, after a tip from a friend who had heard about these cafes in the news and had promptly done the research as to where the closest one was. We picked the Princess Diary cafe near the Ewha Women's University subway exit (go out #3 and walk down to the little street just before the Starbucks and turn in and look up to your right – you'll see the sign on a close-by building – and tell them you heard about it through this blog!), and the whole affair turned out to be a smashing success. Makeup was applied, hair was done, dresses were worn, pictures were taken, and many smiles and laughs were made.
Have to be a Cyworld member to see the site. Not very smart, if you ask me.
And yes, I indeed had fun with a bunch of girls at a quirky cafe that lets the ladies dress up in wedding gowns and other lacy, frilly outfits that you'll probably not get to wear in Korea lest you 1) get married, or 2) attend a state dinner. The people at the cafe do some basic makeup, help you pick out and put on clothes, as well as get set up properly for pictures. They have several photo lamps, ornate benches and stools, as well as a decently-stocked supply of accessories.
When we went, there was a gaggle of girls (5) all in white wedding gowns, floating and flitting around the one large room, occasionally coalescing together for a few cellphone and digital camera shots before breaking the huddle to explore new combinations of positions and people, dual and solo portraits, and stopping for the occasional sip from the long-abandoned refreshments from their original waiting table.
Despite this being one of either the girliest or gayest thing that a man could do on a Friday night, I felt a little sheepish about having had so much fun being there. There were enough eager takers in our small crowd of five that it ended up being alright: two girls (Susan of podcast cuisine commentary fame) and a friend of a friend visiting Seoul for the week, decided to model, two other girls decided to be fashion fitting assistants for the evening, and I had already been recruited as the resident photographer.
For our evening of fun, I had decided to whip out and bring 'round "The Guv'ner," my medium-format Pentax 67 behemoth of a camera that I bought for another photo project I've been working on. Just so you know, this camera, while being shaped like a 35mm camera, is about twice the size of a fancy, new 35mm, weighs about 4 times as much, which explains the need for a separate wooden grip to even hold it steady. It weighs as much as a hypothyroidic sumo wrestler raised on Jupiter. I'm competent with it and can get exposures down to a half-stop's accuracy, but I still have to take a lot of time with it and double-check everything. And I still don't feel comfortable with it, like I've authoritatively nailed the shots I wanted; I still cross my fingers every time I get slides back from it.
In any case, my first trip out with the girls was a success and loads of fun, and I secretly vowed to return. This was all possible with super-friendly and fun Sunyeong, who is a subtle cad, the kind of person who is really quiet in a group and everyone thinks is a wallflower, but you get her comfortable in a small group or one on one, and she's a non-stop ball of energy. She's girly, perky, and quite self-consciously hammy in front of the camera. I tease her about whether or not she practices cutesy and funny poses in front of the mirror at home, which she vehemently denies ever having done. But I have my suspicions.
So after it was decided that we were going to rush off to the dress cafe at the last minute on a Sunday evening, I stopped by home to bring along my Polaroid Mini and really get to know it better this, the second time around, as I like the effect of the instant shot – its immediate in-the-momentness is something that neither my nice 35mm nor my medium-format dinosaur is too refined to duplicate. There is a certain kind of fun that comes with shooting in Polaroid, which is something I had never really tried before. But with Sunyeong, all became possible, thanks to her indomitable longing to mug and model.
Things started out calmly. There were several other customers doing their thing in white wedding dresses while we sipped on required drinks, waiting for our turn in line. The two girls in front of us were kind of gangsta in a really weird way, which also kind of scared us. One girl posing in her little white wedding dress looked like she could pimp-smack a member of the Mokpo mafia with a lit cigarette hanging from her lip and a leering sneer; yet here she was, gritting her teeth and forcing her obviously little-used smile muscles into an awkward grimace for the camera. I wanted be bitchy and talk smack about them with Sunyeong. But the girl had a voice deeper than mine and a Kyeongsangdo accent. Sunyeong's from Pusan, so she knows the deal; we just smiled nervously and didn't say nuthin.' Shhh.
So as she started to powder poof herself up, I pulled out the Polaroid to start things off. The cafe employee quickly informed us that they would do basic makeup for us and that maybe she shouldn't get into anything drastic before getting up to bat. Sunyeong just continued to pose, using her compact as a prop. The fun had officially begun.
After finally picking out her puffy piece of princessicity, Sunyeong was ready for her closeup. She liked her serious wedding dress, but the whole getup was already cracking her up. Here, she loses it while she tries to capture the serious mood required to do certain wedding poses. Polaroid is awesome.
Ooooh. The wedding pose. After the giggles were gone, Sunyeong started hitting all her marks, both serious and sweet, like a primped, prima-donna professional. It was all done tongue-in-cheek, but there was definitely some real pretty Pusan princess thrown in there. Once she had found her stride, Sunyeong was no joke until the shutter was pressed. It was all fun and games, but there was a part of me that mused, "This girl ain't playing."
When we got to the little end table, it was on, dude. The cutesy poses were being pulled out the bag; the kid gloves had come off. She had started head-tilting and had turned the coy beams on. I was cracking up at this point. I pulled myself together enough give her a jab by again pointedly asking whether she practiced these poses in the mirror at home. She was more indignant; I was even more suspicious.
Jumping Jehosephat! Sunyeong was now in full form and wasn't pulling punches anymore. She had gotten pure Princess on a brutha – and there was no turning back. I just continued to shoot and no longer needed to pose her. She had it all under control. I was now officially just along for the ride.
Here, I get a shot in edgewise. I paused the shooting to get her to look into the camera for a "selca" (SELf-CAmera) shot, which meant trying to center that big, awkward Polaroid camera properly, something I had only managed to do moderately well as I tried to get my own big face into the mix. Sunyeong came out looking great, of course. She always seems to be able to pull off just the right expression, whereas I tend to force my mouth into a grimace that only barely comes off looking unstrained. This was one of my more successful attempts.
As Korean people like to say – 휴! (Whew!) Going through the motions at the dress cafe was pretty exhausting – I guess what they say about modeling being hard is true. Who knew it was really so much hard work to look good? Well, I'll never really know, since I'm usually just behind the camera instead of in front of it. What I got out of the whole experience was a different kind of wow – who knew that Polaroid was still such a fun format? No wonder new life has been breathed into the platform, as there are I think three different sizes of instant photo now, for different uses. In the spirit of the different sizes and uses of pictures, I offer three cuts from our mini-Polaroid session below – and I'm sure Sunyeong will find the last one useful as an MSN ID picture. (순영아 - 마지막 컷을 MSN 아뒤 사진으로 사용해도 될 것같아.)
Finally, check out the difference that 35mm and Photoshop can make. I'm still waiting on my medium-format slide shots (don't hold your breath on those exposures to be right, but I'll put up the results and be honest when they come out); I haven't had time to develop them yet.
What I did below with scans from my 35mm was simply run them through properly adjusting the levels, saturated them to the point of candy-cane madness, and boosted the contrast just a tad. I also fixed the front left end of the wall in the picture below, which got washed out a bit because I didn't angle the flash enough (if you want to avoid bounce-back from a flash on any flat surface, simply stand at a 45-degree angle to that surface– you'd be surprised at how clean your shot will come back).
And it all comes together in the second and final 35mm shot that I'll offer – good dress, good model, good background (some sections of the Idae dress cafe have some pretty beaten-up looking walls and other surfaces that don't stand the test of close scrutiny or an extreme wide-angle lens, like the 20mm I used here to get entire bodies in tight spots, which you want to do if you're dealing with girls trying on dresses). This was one of only a couple spots that looked OK all the ways across the range of my 20mm.
Also, Sunyeong didn't blink, I didn't catch her with her eyes half open, nor did her poses turn out to be too overwrought. I happen to also tend to get really irritated with the East Asian propensity to assume the V-for-Victory stance when taking a picture. As a photographer trying to get natural poses and people being themselves when taking portraits, the ubiquitous "V" kills the mood entirely.
And if you ever wondered why people do this, I'll give you what I think is the answer right here, right now: I think, in the end, it's because people don't know what to do with their hands in the essentially uncomfortable situation of being the center of photographic attention. Notice that people tend not to do the "V" in large groups, because people use each other as props and are just part of a sea of people; and also, most people not on the ends have something to do with their hands.
Now, in Sunyeong's case, she is quite comfortable with the camera and assumes all kinds of poses, both natural and self-consciously affected. I noticed that she went through each pose straight serious, consciously cutesy, and also assumed the "funny" pose using the V-sign that quirkily broke the would-be seriousness of this whole affair of posing in cocktail dresses, formal gowns, or white wedding wear.
Most other Korean girls in the cafes seem to take this stuff pretty seriously and even try to strike the sexy poses, which frankly, most people can't pull off convincingly. I liked this picture a lot because I think it captures the fun of the situation even as it signals the sentiment that "C'mon. You can't really take this all this seriously." Or at least, that if you do, your pictures are going to come out funnier than you intended.
"How to Be a Princess"
For those of you who are interested, make note of a few things that I tell girls when posing for pictures, much of which should be common knowledge. I don't know how much of it is or isn't, so please forgive me if this turns out to be pedestrian stuff. So girls, tips for your dress cafe trip, or for whenever you want to be a princess in front of a lens:
1) Stand with your shoulders at an angle to the camera, so as to reduce your apparent shoulder width. For you girls with broad shoulders, a full 45 degrees is ideal. Sunyeong's naturally observing this rule even though she doesn't have broad shoulders at all.
2) Find your "good side" and highlight it. Everyone has a good side. Look at yourself in the mirror. She denies it, but I think most Korean girls, who take millions of pictures of themselves since the days of sticker pictures and into the present age of digital cameras and cellphones, know their good side.
3) Angle your head down and/or take the picture from a higher angle. This means that if you're taking a picture of friends at dinner, stand up and look down on them with the camera. This is more flattering. Sunyeong angles her head down and looks up with her eyes in almost every shot. She knows this hides chin and looks more "coy." Watch Korean girls taking their 얼짱/euljjang ("pretty face") shots with their cellphones and digital cameras. I always complain that I am annoyed by this, but they are very, very good at it. Too good.
4) If you have thick arms, put them at your sides or pull them back behind you. Bending them makes them look thicker. Sunyeong is doing both, partially violating this rule with one arm, even though she was self-conscious about her bare arms. She's refreshing because in the end, she didn't really care enough to stop her from giving me the V she wanted.
5) Angle your head a bit. Check out Sunyeong doing an extreme version of it in that cutesy Polaroid pose with her hands clasped by her head. Also note her "violating" the previous rule (#4) and that her arms look thicker. Not a problem, but something you might make note of. She'll probably not like me using that particular picture all that much, but I think it's useful and also think the overall effect comes across so well that this picture is a must-include. If I were a fashionista fashion photographer for Vogue or something, I would just Photoshop her arm thinner. I'm not saying it should be done, but that it probably would be in the fashion photo world. Wait – you didn't think any of the models in fashion magazines were real, did you?
6) Strike a real pose. Do something with your hands and try to stay away from the "V". Do something symmetrical. Put your hands behind your back. Clasp them in front so your arms fall naturally along your sides and you reduce shoulder tension as you angle them babies properly to the camera. Speaking of angling...
7) Stick out your chest. No, that doesn't mean thrust them out for display, but straighten your back, stick your chest out proud, and take up your space.
8) Smile! If you feel uncomfortable, practice in front of a mirror. Or your camera phone. Or your digital camera.
Thanks, Sunyeong, for getting me into the dress cafe a second time and for modeling up a storm, while also providing some good grist for my photo blogging mill.