I’m loving the beautiful fall weather we’re having in NYC, and I have an extra skip in my step because my new book is nearly complete! Yaaaaay! Which means we’ll all have to celebrate (details on that will be forthcoming), and you’ll see more of me on the blog.
This week, I want to give you a fun glimpse into the posing chapter from The Art of Boudoir, which includes the 8 Biggest Posing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, Principles of Sensual Posing, My Posing System: Putting It All Together, and more. One section is called:
The 5 Boudoir Poses You Need to Know and Master
Why Five?
When it came time to write about specific poses, I knew I had very limited space. I thought about it for months. (Obsessed about it really.) I kept asking myself: what instruction would give you guys the biggest bang for your buck? I scoured my archives for the critical poses that I couldn’t do a shoot without. After going through every single past boudoir session numerous times, it became quite clear which poses I was using to create stunning, yet varied, results again and again.
I realized that these five poses bring me the greatest amount of success because they fulfill the following criteria:
Most flattering to the widest variety of women
Offer the most variety out of a single pose
Easiest for non-models to perform
Easiest for the photographer to manipulate
So without further ado, here’s one of the five for you…
No. 4 The Serpent
Oh this is such a sexy and slinky pose! It’s a great one to start a session with because even nervous women feel more relaxed and safe in this position. The Serpent will take a bit of coaching and continued reminders for her to hold this extreme posture, so keep encouraging her to push that hip up and arch her back even more than she thinks she can, to create what I call the “triangle of awesomeness” between her hip, upper thigh, and lower abdomen. Ask for the arm facing the camera to be moved out so that we see the side of her breast. This creates gorgeous symmetrical curves and a lot of pleasing triangle shapes.
Note: to really see that “triangle of awesomeness” characteristic of The Serpent, you must be on a surface that has a bit of firmness, whether it’s a bed, couch or the floor. If it’s too soft, her body will sink into it.
There are so many incredible angles for this pose. Shooting from where her feet are produces a saucy point of view, and depending on the position of her legs, the pics can vary from mildly hot to super erotic. You can have her peek over her shoulder at you, and then walk around to the opposite side and capture some gorgeous close-ups, which is what I did to snag the first pic in this post.
Just by changing up your position and/or slight adjustments to the model (such as differing hand gestures, eye-lines and actions), you can create so much variety and every shade of modesty. Add to that a variety of focal lengths from which you photograph her, and we increase variety from the same pose even more! And that’s a whole ‘nother how to section in this book: ways to easily create variety on a shoot, which dramatically increases sales.
