Lindsay’s Playboy Edition Hits the Torrents (err, Newsstands)

As anyone who monitors Digg or any of the major newspaper sites (such as the New York Times) will know the January/February 2012 issue of Playboy magazine featuring Linsday Lohan has been released in the USA.

Additionally, anyone who monitors the torrents will know that scanned versions of this issue of Playboy are in the Top 10 of torrent downloads and have been for about two weeks.

Right now on my favourite torrent site in the ‘books’ section it is third after “The Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart 18/12/2011” (seriously) and “1,001 Facts that Will Scare the S#*t Out of You”.

Interestingly 4th is “Porn Star Secrets of Sex” and no, I haven’t download this to have a look at it.

The nine page spread of Lindsay includes 11 pictures, one of which is a double-page opening.

The shots are all taken in the same setting which is a bit like the red room in Twin Peaks except the floor doesn’t have the checker pattern and nether Special Agent Dale Cooper or Laura Palmer are anywhere to be seen.

From a photographer’s viewpoint there are a number of interesting things going on with these pictures as you can see from the sample at right that I grabbed off the Internet.

Firstly, obviously, the photographers at Playboy have all the BEST equipment. In fact they probably have ten of each of all the BEST equipment.

You can also be very sure they take all pictures as RAW. And yet the highlights in all pictures, even the picture used on the cover, are very close to be being blown; to the point that texture and detail has been lost.

In the sample picture I have shown here the main lighting, in fact probably the only lighting, is coming from the right of Lindsay. The exposure of the shot is such that the lighting on her face, the right side of her right breast, down the right side of her waist, and over her legs, is almost blown. Meaning that the texture and detail in those areas has been whited out, or very nearly whited out, by too much light (over-exposure).

Then there are the really strong harsh shadows. Generally with glamour photography harsh strong shadows are either tamed using complimentary lighting (lighting from another direction), or the model is kept away from the background so she does not cast any strong shadows, or, as much as they can be, offending shadows are edited out in the post-processing.

But as you can see in both of the pictures shown here, and especially in the second example, very little—if anything—has been done to eliminate the shadows with two small exceptions. They have gone in with their photo editor and softened the shadow under her chin a little and they have also softened the shadow that her right breast is throwing across her cleavage and onto the side of her left breast.

It is most likely that they took hundreds of shots of this single pose to get this exact look, so these blown highlights and strong shadows are not a mistake. This is the exact effect they wanted.