Nude

The Boudoir Summer

I had been fascinated by the human body and its potential of being a wondrous subject for photoshoots for quite some time. And last summer, I got a handful of opportunities to explore it through boudoir photography. Having no formal training or prior experience, it was quite overwhelming and a tad bit scary at first. But with each photoshoot that I did, I found myself to be more confident and at ease with the craft.

I implemented my style of playing with the intersection of light and shade. I attempted to accentuate the body’s shape in these light and shadow intersection points to uplift the composition’s beauty. Juggling with different natural light conditions, locations and attires, I pushed the boundaries of my artistic and technical comfort zone.

The lush green outdoors, the warm sun and the occasional rain made shooting boudoir this past summer both fun and challenging. Meeting new people and learning from them in the shoots made my first boudoir series genuinely memorable.

The Boudoir Debut

My first boudoir photo-shoot began with a lot of nervousness, self-doubt and creative blocks. For the first quarter of an hour I had no clue what I was doing. I was rushing all the theories on monochrome boudoir in my mind that I had ever read; and I was asking my model, LM, to copy poses from photographs I randomly recalled from memory.

Gradually after about a dozen shots, I decided to go back to the basics of composition, light and shade dynamics and the classical techniques of figure drawing. Coupled with selective improvisation to the specific conditions of the location, I applied these very basic understandings of the human body, to create an ample collection of boudoir/noir nude photographs.

I followed the natural reactions of my model to the lens for the rest of the hour and tried to capture her raw expressions with very little guidance and manipulations. By putting extra emphasis on the series of points of interaction between the sunlight and the shadows on my model’s body (including in the post-production), I was able to overcome the technical and conceptual barriers of composition, controlling the light and posing my model to produce the following collection. What started out as a nervous experiment finished as an expressive and confident series of boudoir photographs.