‘Duckface’ VS Pout

‘Duckface’ is a jokey name for that silly pout face that girls do on their Myspace and Facebook pictures.

Here’s a picture of a Duckface and a picture of a pout for comparison:

Look at the eyes and the mouth. In the first photo the eyes are looking straight at the camera. In fact, they are practically boggling out of the head. Mmmmm sexy. Not.

In the second pic the eyes are not confrontational. There is a bit more mystery. It’s more relaxed and less ‘LOOK AT MEEEEE! I’M BEING SILLY!’

In the first picture the lips look like a duck’s beak (that’s why it’s called Duckface!). I want you to make the biggest duckface you can right now, and then feel your lips with your fingertips. When you’re doing this face, your lips feel very rigid.

You know when you’re a kid, and you have to kiss your horrible, scary, five hundred year old great Auntie that smells of cabbages and death? Your lips go all rigid and your mouth goes small. Well, if you look like you’re about to snog your Nan’s sister, that doesn’t make for a very pretty or sensual photograph.

In the second picture, the lips look full and relaxed. This is what you look like when you’re about to kiss someone, tongues and everything, that you actually want to kiss. This is the face I would probably pull if Johnny Depp finally admitted the truth (that he loves short, pale, angry ginger girls, and he reads my blog every day and wants to marry me). I’d probably be a bit more cross-eyed than this, and definitely drooling more, but you get the general idea.

How do you pout then? Well, you know when you blow a kiss to somebody, not in a jokey way, but when you mean it? It’s just a very small and subtle version of this. This sounds so twee it makes me want to puke, but pretend you’re very, very gently blowing a feather off the palm of your hand.

Fake smile VS real smile

You know that Posh Spice Beckham woman? Well, I don’t. But I know a couple of people that do. Apparently she’s very sweet and actually dead funny in real life. But you’d never know that from photos of her, because she hardly every smiles. So she comes across as a bit of a miserable cow, even though she’s not really.

If you’re not married to a famous footballer, and formerly a singer in one of the biggest pop groups of the 90’s, then you can’t get away with having a face like a slapped arse in every photogrtaph.

“I don’t like my smile/I look horrible when I smile/I don’t like smiling,”

Tough shit, rubbish and drivel. Everybody has a nice smile. From babies to smelly old tramps, nuns to convicted murderers. Everyone’s smile is nice and pleasant to look at, if they are genuinely smiling. You are not the one person in the whole history of the human race to which that does not apply, so if you want to be a model, stop talking crap and learn how to do it properly.

Here is a picture of a fake smile next to a real smile:

I look like a bitch in the first photo. I look like I’d deliberately train my toddler to bully your toddler, and then when you complain say things like “My Callum is so sensitive. He picks up when other children aren’t happy. I feel bad for people that aren’t happily married like Justin and I. I’m so blessed,”
I’m not married and I don’t have a toddler, but if I went around smiling like this, I would expect my offspring to be conduits for the vileness that I myself dare not express.

I don’t look any prettier or anything in the second photo. But I do look like I’d be a laugh to hang around with. I look like a happy person that laughs a lot.

I don’t actually like my smile very much. I think my face looks weird when I smile. But I would rather think my face looks weird, than for people to think I never smile.

Part of being a model is being totally unselfconscious at the same time as being extremely self-aware.  (Please feel free to send that into Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye). I cringe when I see pictures of me laughing on a night out. I think I look like a pointy-faced witch. I don’t particularly like this photo (above). But I don’t really care that much, it is just a photo, and my face is just a face.

If you struggle with accepting images of yourself, then read ‘Beautiful’ by Katie Piper.

If you want to be able to smile properly for photographs then practice in the mirror. You have to feel relaxed and happy. Happiness has to come from your eyes. Which sometimes means they have to wrinkle up a bit and not look perfect. Don’t ever be a afraid of looking happy.

Laughter & delight

If you can crack off a genuine smile at will, you can fake a laugh or expression of delight. Some photos of models laughing are genuine. But sometimes they’re completely put-on. Like the time I had to wear a tabard and Polyester trousers for an Elder Care apprenticeship program advert, and pretend that I found wiping butts all day long for minimum wage just the most delightful thing in the entire universe.

Having worked as a care assistant when I was 18, I have nothing but respect for people that do this kind of work. However, I hated it, was haunted by some of the sights I saw & the things I experienced, and found it very hard to feel happy and delighted at the thought of that particular job.

If you do any kind of commercial modeling (that means modeling for adverts/posters/websites etc. It tends to pay well) then it really helps if you can look absolutely delighted with the brand of extra-healthy prune-flakes you’re pretending to eat, or to look like you’re finding something really funny.

None of this is rocket-surgery, but it’s kind of essential knowledge, on both sides of the camera. So if you want to be a better model, or better model photographer, it’s really helpful to learn how expressions work.

This is a two-part post for new models and new photographers about facial expressions.

One of the most noticeable differences between newbies (on both sides of the camera) and more experienced models and photographers is the facial expressions in their portfolios.

New models often look nervous, confused, terrified, uptight or bored. They don’t yet know how to come across as relaxed and natural on a shoot.

An experienced model photographer won’t take a single shot until the model has stopped looking like a bulldog in the middle of a prostate exam.

But an inexperienced photographer will be thinking about lots of different things, and making that common newbie error of only ever looking at the model through the camera, instead of just looking to check if everything is ok.

An inexperienced photographer may not notice until afterwards, and even they do notice, they may have no idea what to say or do to get the model to improve her facial expression. Being a model photographer isn’t all F-stops and backdrops. You have to be able to communicate what you want and what you don’t want. And you definitely don’t want a clamp-jawed, frightened-eyed, bored looking fizzog knackering up your shot.

An inexperienced photographer may not notice at the time, but a crap photographer won’t even notice on the final photograph. And a really, truly awful photographer can spend an hour in Photoshop skin-smoothing, eye-brightening, air-brushing your knickers, amplifying your knockers and applying fairy wings and unicorns to the final shot. But they will still fail to notice the terrified eyes and forced smile that makes the model look like she’s won second place in a Cherie Blair impression contest, held by a particularly vicious faction of the Taliban.

It takes time and practice to learn how to do facial expressions. Most of it is in the eyes, and some of it is in the muscle structure of the face, and how that reacts to emotion.

‘Emotion’ is the key word here. Anyone can pull faces. The trick is to relax the face, and then to let the emotion manipulate it.

If you’re a good model, you can control this completely. You’ll know exactly how much emotion to show. It’s a very instinctive thing, but you have to learn how to do it first.

If you’re a good photographer, you’ll understand this from the model’s point of view, and be able to communicate this to somebody that has never modeled before.

So for both models and photographers, let’s start with three basic ‘DON’TS’:

• Don’t tense your bottom jaw, or clamp your teeth together. Your top and bottom teeth should be slightly apart.
• Don’t press your lips together. This makes you look annoyed, and it makes your lips look thinner.
• Don’t frown or squint. The lights in a studio can be very bright. You have to get used to them.

You can wipe out all of these ‘Don’ts’ with one ‘Do’:

• Relax your face. No squinting, no frowning, no clamping, no pressing. No wrinkled-up eyes, no grinding teeth. Just very relaxed.

Read Part 2 soon