The world of boudoir photography gets a bad rap for being full of cheese. And for good reason — there is so much boudoir photography out there that is deeply cheesy. It’s stiff, it’s corny, it’s photoshopped within an inch of its life, and it’s catering to a very specific gaze. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

I get clients all the time who come to me and say “I’m nervous to do a boudoir shoot because I’m afraid I’m going to feel stupid”. And honestly, I think that fear comes from the fact that so much boudoir depicts people doing things that look stupid. So much lip biting, unnatural poses, and “bedroom eyes” that verge more on Clockwork Orange than America’s Next Top Model. Seriously, whoever came up with the “look at me like you have a sexy secret” prompt should be punished by having to scroll through the thousands of “you look more like you have to poop” results that this leads to.

Anyone who has ever tried to take sexy selfies knows that a good portion of them come out looking deeply stupid. Trying to look sexy in a photo is usually a recipe for feeling like an alien in a skin suit. Maybe for some people it feels like a natural thing, but I think for most of us it results in sort of inauthentic, self-conscious looking results. The key to avoiding this is to basically forget everything you’ve heard about how to get sexy photos. And, even more importantly, you might have to forget a lot of things you’ve been taught about what is sexy to begin with.

Whether you’re a boudoir client looking for tips on how to feel non-stupid during your shoot or a boudoir photographer struggling to capture natural and sensual looking photos in your boudoir work, check out my guide to non-cheesy boudoir photography and toss the whole traditional boudoir playbook out the window.

No Static Posing

“Will you pose me?”

Erm, yes and no. I will direct you the whole time; you will never feel abandoned to fend for yourself. But I won’t pose you. Posing is a strategy for directing that, at least for boudoir, all but guarantees that your photos will come out looking stiff and unnatural. Static posing, especially when it involves micromanaging every pinky, every lock of hair, and every angle is usually pretty uncomfortable for the subject. It’s so much to hold in your brain all at once, and it makes you feel like you have to be hyper-controlled to be sexy. It’s basically saying, “sexiness is precarious, and we have to construct it very carefully and then capture it quickly before it disintegrates”. Ew.

I tell my boudoir clients to stay in motion nearly the entire time we’re shooting. The key, however, is the kind of motion. I tell them to move slowly, intuitively, and with their breath. I direct them to stretch, explore length and fluidity, and to move at about half speed of how they usually move. Not only does this keep you more in touch with your body and its sensations, it also prevents the I’m-holding-in-a-fart look while we’re exploring what should be a deeply relaxing experience.

I give my boudoir clients plenty of direction as we’re shooting, but I like to let the client’s natural way of moving and being in their body take the lead. I want people to move in ways that feel natural and intuitive to them so that the resulting photos look like them, not like something I am projecting onto them.

Keep It Tactile

Touch yourself.

Like a lot.

Touch your skin, touch your hair, touch your clothes, touch the environment, touch everything. Boudoir is best when it’s a very touchy experience. This is especially easy and fun when you’re doing couples boudoir, since you get to just rub your hands all over your babe. But it’s equally important in solo boudoir sessions! Not only does it keep you grounded in sensuality, it also results in the hottest photos.

Feeling First

I always start my boudoir sessions by having my clients take a few minutes to settle into their bodies. Stretch, breathe, check in with the nooks and crannies, and tune into the sensations in their bodies that so many of us spend our days tuning out of. Then, I tell them that throughout the shoot, I want them to focus on what their body feels like, not what it looks like.

It might sound counterintuitive to ignore what you look like when you’re having someone photograph you, but I guarantee you that even if your goal is to walk away with hot photos, thinking the whole time about what you look like will not be the way to accomplish that. It makes you self-conscious, hyper-aware of all the things that you don’t like about the way you look in an effort to make sure those things aren’t coming through, and just takes you out of your body.

When I look at boudoir photos, I want to feel something. So much boudoir photography comes across as hollow and disconnected, and I think that’s because not nearly enough attention is being paid to the connection between how you feel during the shoot and the way the photos look. If you feel uncomfortable, your photos will probably read as uncomfortable. If you feel in tune with your body and you’re moving from a place of sensuality and breath, getting hot photos is just a matter of me capturing the energy that’s already in front of me.

It’s your job to just be in touch with your body. A good photographer will know how to turn that into hot photos.

Forget About Eye Contact

I’d say in about 99% of the photos I take of myself where I’m looking at the camera, my face looks nothing like what I think it looks like. In my head, I’m giving Tyra. In reality, I’m giving double dose of Benadryl.

Some people are really excellent at photo eyes. They look engaged, connected, relaxed, alluring. Most of those people are professional models. And a select few boudoir clients I’ve had who have just really mastered the non-awkward sexy eye contact.

For most of us, doing an intentionally sexy face looking into the camera is extremely unnatural. And why should it be natural! Most of us don’t spend much time having professional photos taken of us, much less professional sexy photos, so why should we know how to tap into that in a shoot? Plus as soon as we get in front of the camera, most of us suddenly feel hyper self-conscious, which we already know translates into uncomfortable photos.

There are plenty of tricks photographers, myself included, use all the time to get natural eye contact in photo sessions, but actually my favorite way to avoid weird faces is to just skip the eye contact all together in a boudoir shoot. At least for most of the session. I really love when boudoir photos have a sort of almost voyeuristic aesthetic to them, like if you didn’t know any better you’d think that the subject didn’t even know the photographer was in the room. Closed eyes are actually incredible hot when what we’re trying to evoke is a deeply sensual experience — what could be more sensual than disappearing into sensations so much that you have to close your eyes and just feel them?

So you can skip the bedroom eyes and just focus on what your body is feeling, and just let your face follow naturally. It never leads me astray.

Fuck “Flattering”

I could write a dissertation about how bullshit the notion of “flattering” is. It’s one of those sneaky words that sounds like it means something like “you at your best” but, when you dig deeper, usually means something like “approximating a particular set of beauty standards”. There might be a very limited set of cases where that word could mean something non-toxic, but I think in most cases it’s a shifty little synonym for things like “slimmer”, “smaller”, “longer and leaner”, “curvier in the right ways”, blah blah blah. And fuck that.

I think that photographers focusing on flattering-ness, and especially when they let that language creep into the way they direct or talk to clients about their bodies, is one of the worst things they can do, even (and especially) when their stated goal is to help clients embrace their bodies. And given how common that goal is and how many boudoir photographers use that kind of body-positive language in their branding and messaging, I think a lot of us have a long way to go in really unpacking the more subtle ways that weird and gross standards permeate how we think about bodies and beauty.

We all have insecurities. Clients often come into their shoots and say, “I’m insecure about this part of my body” or “can you make me look more XYZ?” What I always tell them is this:

“We don’t have to pretend those insecurities don’t exist, but I also don’t want to let them steer the ship here. What if we just let them sit quietly in the corner while we shoot? They’ll be available for you to pick them back up when we’re done if you want, but I don’t think they deserve to be in charge in this room. Let’s see what happens when we just give them a break for a few hours.”

Limit Retouching

Even after the shoot ends, the commitment so many photographers have to enforcing bullshit body standards endures. So much boudoir is photoshopped to DEATH, so that the resulting images look so distorted and airbrushed that clients look more like Bratz dolls than adult human beings. WHY?? WHY.

Bodies have natural texture. They have shape and color and asymmetry and they take up space and thank god for that. When we try to smooth away all of the interesting edges and details that bodies contain, every boudoir photo looks the same. It could be a photo of absolutely anyone, and we’ve completely lost the plot of what brings most people to boudoir in the first place — to celebrate and capture them.

What I tell people when they ask me if I will retouch their photos is this: I will only retouch things that don’t represent what your body normally looks like. If you have a random scratch on your face that isn’t usually there, or you got a gnarly sunburn last weekend, or you ran into your coffee table and have a big ol’ bruise on your shin, I’m happy to edit that out because that’s not a basic part of what your body looks like. But curves, fat, cellulite, hair, wrinkles, etc. — that’s just you babyyyyyy, and that stays. FaceTune can eat my ass.

De-Gender It

Most boudoir is targeting at cis women. Like, nearly all of it. Most boudoir photographers even explicit use that language in their marketing — “helping women embrace themselves”, “celebrating the female form”, etc. And like, wow what a bummer to limit it to only that!

I get LOTS of clients who come to me looking for a queer boudoir photographer or a boudoir photographer who specifically captures more than just cis women. This is partly because, obviously, more than just cis women are looking for boudoir photographers. But it’s also because boudoir photography can be such a fun and exciting and therapeutic way to explore gender expression! Lots of those clients are specifically interested in exploring non-traditional gender presentation in their shoot, and some of them are even using their shoot to explore some of those aspects of themselves for the first time ever.

I cannot overstate what an honor it is to be able to help people do that kind of self-exploration. But it’s a kind of trust that you can only earn as a photographer if you are actively working to dismantle those traditional notions of who boudoir is for and examine how our collective concepts of what is sexy and attractive are deeply, deeply intertwined with prescriptive gender roles.

Anyway, gender is a potato. And boudoir is for everyone.

Find Your Own Flavor of Sexy

Boudoir is at least partially about capturing something sexy. But wtf does that mean? What is sexy?

I think there are as many ways of being sexy as their are people. For some people, their sexy is joyful. For some, it’s moody and mysterious. For others, it’s playful. For still others, it’s grungy and ugly. Whatever your particular flavor of sexy is, I want to capture that, not some sort of one-size-fits-all notion of sexiness.

When I have a consultation with a boudoir client, I always like to have them compile a little bit of visual inspiration for me (bless a Pinterest board) and send me a little reflection on what they hope to explore and capture in the shoot and a few adjectives that capture the mood they want to evoke. This gives me a good reference point for who they are and what best captures their personal sense of what feels sexy to them. Because who the fuck am I to decide that for them?

Think Outside the Genre

Okay I could write another dissertation about the absolute flaming hot takes that some people have about what does and does not count as boudoir. A lot of photographers have some ^VERY STRONG VIEWS^ about this one.

I call a lot of what I do boudoir photography both because it’s an easy search term for clients to use to find me and also because that’s the genre that a lot of my work grew out of. Some people might look at some of my work and insist, “that’s intimate portraiture! that’s fine art nude photography! that’s erotica! that’s porn! that’s just regular portraiture!”

Apart from the fact that who gives a shit, I actually also think that this kind of rigid attachment to genre categories is counterproductive for photographers. It incentivizes narrowness and uniformity in their work, it stifles creative exploration for both them and their clients, and it blinds one to real and inspiring opportunities to create something that really captures something true for their clients. In fact, new clients often come to me and say that my work called to them precisely because it wasn’t what they were expecting when they searched for boudoir photography.

Sometimes what a client or photographer wants to explore in a shoot is not neatly categorizable in that way, or straddles multiple genres of photography, and if that means the final result doesn’t look like traditional boudoir photography then w h o c a r e s? Pursuit of non-dogmatic creative inspiration and authenticity is a powerful antidote to cheese, so follow the anti-cheese, whatever genre you want to call it.

BREATHE

The last and perhaps most important key to non-cheesy boudoir photography is breath. Breath and then more breath and then after you’re done breathing do some more breathing. No holding your breath, no sucking in your stomach so you can only take shallow breaths, no frozen, static, butthole-clenching posing. Breeeeeeattttthhhhhhheee.

Non-cheesy boudoir photography is not only possible, it’s easier than the cheese. It’s more authentic, more honest, more creative, and most importantly, more you. All you have to do is forget everything you’ve been told about how to do it.

The Definitive Guide to Non-Cheesy Boudoir Photography