What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo
In the realm of boudoir photography, understanding what makes a good boudoir photo is key. This understanding is reflected in the 5 fundamental aspects that I consider essential in all great boudoir photos. Each image in my portfolio undergoes a meticulous self-assessment based on:
By thoughtfully evaluating and articulating what appeals to me in each of these elements, I continuously refine and enhance my portfolio, ensuring it evolves over time.
What keeps all “good” boudoir photos from looking the same is your unique aesthetic. For my images, I like dramatic lighting, tasteful posing, genuine expression, and everything captured precisely in-camera.
By articulating what I like about each of the above aspects, I’m naturally able to create a recognizable look you’ll notice across my portfolio.
Adhering to this foundation allows me to focus on improving my skills over time.
Additionally, this focus ensures a consistent experience for my clients, so they know what to expect when they book a photo shoot with me.
Let’s delve into each aspect of a good boudoir photo in more detail. My goal is to describe these aspects in a style-independent manner, so you can easily apply these fundamentals to your own work.
What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo: Location
I always begin conceptualizing my boudoir photos by figuring out where I want my subject to be. Once I know this, I can thoughtfully frame the photo and begin building in the other core elements.
Where you choose to create the boudoir photo can influence other core aspects of the image, like lighting. As another example, the kind of pose you might choose for the subject might change depending on the location you choose. In other words, this means that the location can suggest what choices you should make for the other core elements.
To illustrate this point, sometimes I choose a location because I notice interesting ambient lighting on the floor or wall. When this happens, I like to position my subject in this light for a unique, creative look.
Other times, there are things in the background I want to include in the photo, like lights or furniture. Including background elements is a great way to give extra context and help tell your image's story.
Sometimes the location for a boudoir photo is as simple as a white wall in the client's home. Other times it’s in front of an elaborate window at a luxury hotel. The idea is the same in either case; it's about choosing the location that best suits the subject and the desired backdrop for the portrait.
What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo: Lighting
Great lighting is a cornerstone of any exceptional boudoir photo. The way the light falls across the woman’s face and body can add extra depth and dimension.
Lighting is a potent tool for boudoir photographers to create drama, accentuate features, and even hide problem areas. The lighting in a boudoir photo can significantly enhance or detract from the subject's appearance.
The light patterns that fall across the woman’s body and face are dictated by the direction and quality of light in relation to the pose. Light patterns are the shadows that occur when light skims across the woman’s body and face.
Case in point, I typically reject all photos that don’t have one of the following light patterns on the woman’s face:
Paramount light / butterfly light
Split light
Rembrandt Lighting
Loop Lighting
Beauty Light / Ring Light
Lighting is then further defined beyond the pattern by perspective, hardness, and dynamic range.
Perspective: Helps define whether the portrait is short or broad lit. Short lighting is when the shadow side of the face is closest to the camera. Broad lighting is when the lit side of the face is closest to the camera.
This is an example of short lighting
This is an example of broad lighting
Shadow Hardness: Describes the crispness or gradient between the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights. Hard shadows have a distinct line where the dark and light parts of the skin meet, while soft shadows have a more gradual transition.
Soft light
Hard Light
Dynamic Range: Refers to the contrast between the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights in terms of luminosity.
High dynamic range
Low dynamic range
What will make good lighting for one woman’s boudoir photo will not necessarily look good for another. For example, boudoir photos lit by the sun can chisel features like no other light source, making it a favorite technique for subjects with smooth skin.
However, for a client concerned about wrinkles, a soft light source with generous fill light would be more flattering than a mono-directional, hard light source.
What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo: Composition
Composition in your boudoir photos includes the crop, framing of the photo, how the woman is posed, and how she is styled. These elements work in concert to build the overall look and flow of your captures.
Composition is a very deep topic worthy of its own article. For now, here are the basics of good composition that all boudoir photos should express.
Crop / Framing
The crop refers to the aspect ratio of the photo. It's also used to describe what the photographer chooses to exclude when composing the frame of the boudoir photo. One of my favorite mantras in portrait photography is: "If you dislike something, hide it; if you can’t hide it, crop it; if you can’t crop it, don’t shoot it."
In other words, what you choose to exclude from your frame is just as important as what you include. A good crop can make flattering boudoir photos in less-than-ideal locations. However, tight crops should be handled carefully to avoid displeasing cuts, such as cropping limbs below the knee or elbow, which can disrupt the composition.
The rule of thirds, along with other techniques like leading lines, triangles, the golden ratio, and my personal favorite, the golden spiral, are traditional guides to engage the viewer.
A skilled photographer will internalize these guidelines, aiming to place points of interest at or near appropriate spots during capture.
Posing
Posing is about accentuating your subject's strengths and minimizing areas they are insecure about. It varies with each individual and depends on their body specifics.
One key idea in posing women for boudoir is that body parts brought towards the camera are emphasized, while areas pushed away are muted. These decisions are heavily influenced by the photographer's stylistic choices. For instance, I might pose skinny women with accentuated curves or position a curvier woman's hip away from the camera to make her appear smaller in a standing pose. These perspectives significantly impact the final photos.
Posing also plays a crucial role in lighting. By positioning a woman into a light source, you can perfect the light pattern or use shadow to conceal areas she might be self-conscious about.
Styling
Styling encompasses the props, outfit, and hair and makeup choices. These stylistic decisions greatly contribute to the look of the final photo.
Props, like a chair or a sheet, can suggest poses for implied nude photos. I assist my clients in choosing lingerie that flatters their bodies, using my boudoir guide during consultations. This guidance is crucial for ensuring they don't bring ill-fitting pieces or lingerie that doesn't meet their goals.
As for hair and makeup, I hire top artists to enhance my clients' features
What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo: Emotion
Emotion or expression is the most challenging aspect to direct in boudoir photography. In short, even with the best location, perfect lighting, an amazing composition, a stunning pose, and all technical aspects nailed down in-camera, a poor expression can ruin it all. Expression is critical for a good boudoir photo!
Expression encompasses the non-verbal cues used to communicate with the viewer of the photograph. I highly recommend that everyone reading this becomes proficient in understanding body language clusters.
Books on body language are a good starting point for understanding what effective clusters look like and how they can convey the intended message to the viewer.
This skill is often mastered by headshot photographers. If you want to practice evoking emotional responses, focusing on headshots is a good approach as you learn to direct the emotion you want your subject to convey.
I direct body language into my boudoir photos to add emotional depth and authenticity. These non-verbal signals are what finish a boudoir photo, making it both captivating and genuine. If a boudoir photo seems off despite looking visually fantastic, the issue is almost always related to poor or inconsistent body language.
What Makes a Good Boudoir Photo: Technical Settings
The final aspect that contributes to a good boudoir portrait is the technical settings chosen by the photographer. You could direct the perfect pose with an authentic expression, but if the capture is overexposed, none of it will matter. This is why technical settings are a core element of every great boudoir photo.
Technical settings encompass aspects such as exposure settings, lens choice, strobe power, and post-processing. Assuming these settings are reasonable (e.g., the face isn’t overexposed), there can be significant variation in what constitutes “good” technical settings for your boudoir photos.
To illustrate this variation, consider two retouchers given the same raw file, each editing the photo in their own style. The edited photos will almost surely look different when delivered, reflecting the distinct color toning decisions made by each retoucher.
Variation aside, boudoir photographers should make their technical decisions deliberate. To this end, I believe it’s imperative to capture all your boudoir photos manually, ensuring total control over the image exposure. It’s also important to set all your strobes to manual, which will ensure consistency during Lightroom culling and batch edits.
Whatever technical settings you choose, the most important aspects are to properly expose the skin and define the lighting in-camera. Attempting to manipulate these parameters in post-production will lead to more time behind your computer and generally results in a poorer final image than if you had accurately set your technical parameters during the shoot.
Conclusion
There are 5 core elements that make up a good boudoir photo: Location, lighting, composition, emotion, and technical settings. When all 5 of these elements are well executed, a great boudoir portrait is created.
If any of these elements are lacking, it significantly affects the quality of the photo. Meticulous attention to all of these elements, regardless of style, will lead to better images and more consistent results for your clients.
These 5 elements form the checklist I use when creating boudoir photos and diagnosing problems during sessions. If I set up a woman and the capture doesn’t seem like it could fit in my portfolio, the first thing I do is run down this list to diagnose what could be improved.
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