Boudoir Photo

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From the moment I met Liz I could see that she woule be ideal for a glamourous boudoir photo. Luckily one day she had half an hour free and so I hastily put a simple set together in the studio using a mirror as a prop.

I have to say that Liz was absolutely excellent and the majority of the shots worked. I particularly liked the dreamy expression in this one though! It also uses a couple of principals I have mentioned elsewhere on the site - such as using mirrors in boudoir photographs and not looking at the camera when posing for boudoir photographs.

Technical Information

Camera: Canon EOS 7D DSLR

Lens: EF70-200f4L at 122mm

Exposure: f8, 1/250, ISO100

Lighting

The lighting for this shot was a little bit tricky - I wanted a strong light behind her (facing towards the camera) but the only way I could set up the mirror was leaning against a wall, but fortunately I was able to move things around so that the mirror was next to a doorway, and could put the light in the adjacent room. This light provides the highlight along her cheek, arm and hair.

I then used a second light with a softbox behind me to balance the first. This gives a nice flat light, taking out the shadows which would otherwise have fallen across her face. It also provides a catch-light in the eyes and highlights on her glossy lips.

Post Processing

The original image was pretty good, so there have only been a few simple post-processing steps:

Conversion to black and white (by simple desaturation in Aperture 3)
Contrast increase using an S-curve Curves adjustment - again in Aperture 3.
Aperture3 Skin Smoothing filter applied everywhere (Radius 10.0, Detail 0.75, Intensity 0.5)

In all, the post processing probably only took a few minutes.

For more information on the technical details see here: lighting, exposure, iso.

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