Today’s Post by Blue Moon Staff
She’s got legs, she knows how to use them.—ZZ Top
You can call it boudoir photography if you like but here at Blue Moon Boudoir Photography we prefer to use the term Intimate portraiture.
For this session this particular model wanted a photograph to show of what she considered her greatest asset—her legs—so the focus of the composition and the pose is on her legs. The composition includes the subject’s face but also her legs but also the rest of her body as well.
At Blue Moon, we use a technique called guided posing in which no real “poses” are used but the subjects are placed in positions that are comfortable for them—this’s the key word—and then slight changes are made to produce the final and best result. The initial pose for this session started with a suggestion to the subject that she place her hands on her legs, which she did in a nicely delicate manner but blocked the secondary subject of the portrait—her legs. That was just the starting pose and was refined over eight different shots until we made one after the “keeper” (above) but this one turned out to be the best.
One of our philosophies that that when the photographer gets what he thinks is the best shot, he makes one or two extras and every now and then these extra shots are the best ones. In the movie biz this is referred to as a “safety shot,” just in case… And sometimes these turn out to be the best of the shoot because the subject relaxes even more.
How I Made this Portrait: I photographed Liz in the living room of my former home using only the available light from the windows that are behind her and the large North-facing, second floor windows behind the camera. The camera used was a Canon EOS 50D with my go-to available light glamour lens, the EF 85mm f/1.8 lens with an exposure of 1/60 sec at f/1.8 and ISO 200.
