So, everyone is okay with it?
There are, of course, people who are not comfortable with this arrangement and it’s totally fine. I think of them the same way as people who cannot afford the service or live outside of my market – they are not my customers yet. They’ll come around. Boudoir is an amazing experience that every woman should experience in her life.

How do you make women feel comfortable working with a male photographer?
There are a few things you need to keep in mind. One is the experience – I’ve been doing this for 8 years and I’ve mostly worked with female models through fashion, designer and editorial photo shoots. I am very professional on all of my shoots. Another is that it’s almost never a one on one photoshoot – I have a makeup/hair artist, I may have a fashion or wardrobe stylist, potentially an assistant, so it’s a crew. The shoot is a team effort and everyone is keeping each other in check. Sort of like a system of checks and balances.

Do you think your work is different from female photographers?
In the same way, a work of one artist is different from another artist. We’ve come such a long way to recognize and equalize women in many aspects of our lives and now to question if a man can do this is kind of reverse sexism. We all have our artistic vision and we all get to implement it the way we see. I follow many male and female boudoir photographers and when I scroll through their works I don’t even know if I am looking at works of a male or female photographer. All I care about is if images have artistic value, are they done tastefully, do they empower the client, do they make the client feel better about themselves.

What would you say are the top three challenges of being a male boudoir photographer?
First is probably managing the significant others. Usually, it’s not the female client who has a problem with a male boudoir photographer, it’s their boyfriend or husband. It’s a problem for them, especially when they want the photos to be a gift.
Second is the expectation of safety. Women expect themselves to be almost naked or fully naked in front of men in a very limited number of life situations. It is my responsibility to make sure they feel safe and comfortable. In many ways our setup and the environment we create helps a lot – it looks more like a movie set, and our client is a star. It creates this professional vibe that is while still intimate, still remains very professional.
The third is keeping the client in check. As I have said – we create a very safe and comfortable environment and an amazing experience. A lot of times the client would break any boundaries that they have established to try something new and provocative. Once people feel safe they start pushing their own limits. And we are here to keep you from going overboard. Because time is limited, and you want to make sure the client will want to use the pictures once they “wake up”.

What do you mean by pushing limits?
Before the shoot, I try to question most of my client’s decisions, especially anything regarding nudity and revealing various body parts. I always ask if it is something they are comfortable with. So when I start the shoot I have my own expectations of limits – because I want to respect my client and want to make them comfortable. When a client decides to push those limits – to go for more revealing looks, more outrageous ideas – it is my responsibility to question that and make sure they really want those images to exist.

Does that happen often?
Not often, but it happens. I am very kink friendly and I make sure to make my clients aware of that to be completely transparent. I have several publications in kink-related magazines – in addition to others, so it’s out there, you can view it. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but sometimes clients want to try things to see what it would look like – because they saw this picture online, or that movie or something. They want to try it although they didn’t initially want to do any of that. We’re treading very carefully around that because we want the client to have this amazing magic experience, but we don’t want them to have any regrets afterward. But it gives them this “out of this world” experience, it’s a “magic journey” as I call it. Each photo shoot is a journey, mine is “magic journey” because we end up creating magic.

You talk about magic – do you use Photoshop magic often?
It makes my opinions very unpopular in certain circles, but I do use Photoshop a lot. It’s not just to make a size 16 client look like size 2, but to make the images more visually appealing and artistically sound. For all intents and purposes, I can spend 30 minutes in Photoshop retouching wrinkles on your dress (and I did!) because I believe they take away from the picture. Or fix the lighting. Not all Photoshop is about making everyone super skinny, in many cases, it’s about improving things that could not be improved during the shoot. It’s a tool that makes certain aspects of photography easier.

Thank you. Any closing words? Where can we see your work?
Boudoir photography is a beautiful thing. To me, it’s more art than commerce, so I do create it as an art. You can see it on my website – www.wannaglow.com or on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/commanderpirx/

For full tearsheet – scroll down.

Text reads:

Vlad Grubman / ZealusMedia.com
Photographer’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/commanderpirx/

Skye Marlowe
Model’s instagram link: https://www.instagram.com/skyemarlowe

Model’s answers:

How young are you?

A lady never tells

Name some of your tattoos?

pair of angel wings, a skull, a heart and a phoenix

How many do you have or an average of how many you may have?

Is a lot a number? About 25

What is your favorite tattoo and why?

my wings. I thought I would never have a pair because it took to long, too much money and pain

What was your first gig?

modeling for a book

How long have you been in the industry?

it will be a year in October 7

What are your special talents?

I make awesome cocktails and do a good British accent

What are your hobbies?

Modeling, make up and working out

Tell us about yourself!

About me I grew up in a rural area at least back then, spent summers on a farm, canoeing and fishing.Now I have lived in the city for a long time and.love it. I was a makeup artist and still occasionally do make up for shoots , I love old movies even silent ones. My favorite actor is Keanu Reeves. I love collecting Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. I really want to learn how to surf and live near the beach.

Since I have already mentioned that I am not making my living as photographer, I’ll focus on technical side of things.

#1 – Always Be Shooting – if you know A.B.C. from the business side of things you already know what this means. Don’t stop. The more you shoot, the more variety you do – the better your game is. I am going through a rough patch of my personal life right now. I don’t have ability to set up elaborate photo shoots or travel to places to do photography full scale. I practice on things, use random subjects, get an odd opportunity, visit a conference or show.

#2 – Revisit old works. See what can be improved. I’ve redone some concepts a few times and each time gotten better results because of the experience I have acquired since then.

#3 – Simplify. Anything that can be simplified – should be simplified. I used to lug around whole studio – softboxes, flashes, cables – you name it. Right now I am down to 3 or 4 speedlights, some portable modifiers and a lot of rechargeable AA batteries.

#4 – Always do more. Always shoot more pictures than you need. Buy extra memory cards. Give your client one extra image for free. It’s better to have more material and pick the best of the best than scrape at the bottom of an almost empty barrel.

#5 – When in doubt – start at f/8 aperture and 1/125 shutter speed. It should be right in the middle of everything and will bring you closer to the actual settings faster.

#6 – In low light situation always remember, that unless you are physically trained for holding heavy objects in your hands for extended periods of time (like in military) you will get motion blur in images starting from around 1/60 shutter speed. It’s better to up the ISO and deal with noise than to get unusable image because of motion blur. Also, check out this blog post on Night Photography.

#7 – Don’t trust the LCD screen. If you have a chance – bracket, or learn to read a histogram. If your eyes aren’t as good as they used to be – bracket always.

#8 – Follow the rules. I always enable 9 squares in my viewfinder. It helps with composition.

#9 – Break the rules. Even though I always have 9 squares enabled I shoot subjects in the middle, break images in half or shoot something at the edge of the frame.

#10 – Save/Backup/Share – make sure you got the sequence right. Save your images to a computer as soon as you can. Back them up to another drive or the cloud. Then share edits if you want.

#11 – Don’t listen to anyone. If you think you have to do something – just do it. I get a lot of flak from “professional boudoir photographers” for over-editing only to see two weeks later same photographers are asking advice on how to use Liquify tool. Seriously – don’t listen to anyone. If you want to make 4pm daylight look like 2am moonlight – go for it.

#12 – Listen to everyone to keep learning. I am subscribed to a dozen of communities on stuff I am years behind on. Keep learning and keep doing new stuff – not only it’s very exciting, but it also helps you figure out how to do old stuff you were doing in a new way.

Brand is not important, so I will not throw around any brand names. I started my semi-professional photography with Soviet-era cameras, switched to digital going through Kodak, Minolta, Fuji then finally arriving at Nikon after extensively testing Canon. I loved Canon’s usability and handling, it’s just Nikon’s images look better to me personally. So go and pick your own toys. All cameras these days take amazing images – technically speaking. It’s not the hardware that matters.

What is important in taking photographs of people is how you use the camera you have and how you compose (or frame) the shot. Trust me, I’ve seen people with $6000 cameras and $12000 lens not knowing what they do. I’ve worked with a gentleman who used 10 years old flash, gaffers tape and pieces of a cardboard to stage a fashion photo shoot outside in direct sunlight with clouds swinging in and out due to high wind. The resulting shot looks like it was taken in the studio.

If you are just starting you may not know which “people” photography you want to do. It could be portraits/headshots, could be fashion/editorial or it could be action – like sports or street photography or recreational activities. In most cases you can start off with one or two lens and when you figure out where your passion lies – you can start investing in a more specialized equipment.

My personal favorite is any of the vibration reduction basic zoom lens. You need to cover range between 35 and 135 mm when using standard 35 mm frame – called FX or full frame in digital photography. Consumer-grade cameras usually have smaller size sensors so you need to adjust lens’ native focal length to sensor size.

As a rule a 50 mm is considered “human eye” perspective. Portraits mostly shot at 80 – 85 mm. Depending on how far from the subject you are positioned – a longer range can be used. Personally I prefer to use my 70–200 mm for portrait, beauty and glamour and boudoir photography, but I constantly run into issues if I have to shoot in small spaces. In those cases I fall back to Nikon 24–120 mm. Yes, it distorts images differently but if you apply proper correction in Camera Raw or Lightroom (whichever one you’re using) – it shouldn’t be an issue. One nice feature of 70–200 mm is the aperture of f/2.8 which blurs background nicely. It’s a big “YES” for beauty or fashion but I’d say it’s a “NO” for street photography.

For anything involving fast movement (sports, street) you want to use fast lens and probably could invest in the camera that supports less noise on high ISO settings. Depending on your budget it could be something semi-professional or completely high-scale. I’d suggest studying DPReview’s extensive camera knowledge base before making a decision here. For me it’s always a compromise between budget and camera’s capabilities. For example – this photo of a martial arts athlete still came out somewhat blurry at his feet even when I used fast shutter – it wasn’t fast enough.

I haven’t done a real street photography for a while, so I can’t really say what you may want to do there. Again – do you want to focus on a specific person, emotion or face, or do you want to capture the street, the location with people interacting? Based on that I’d say the same basic 35 – 135 mm range is enough to get started and figure things out. The closest I got to shooting street photography was obviously staged “Love Story Gone Wrong” but I still ended up pushing my equipment to its limits (I give a better account on that in my other blog post: How To Learn Night Photography?)

To conclude (TL;DR): pick any camera you can afford, start with lens that cover most shooting scenarios and work your way through specific topic that you are passionate about.

The full question is: What are some cheap alternatives to professional photography backdrops?

Short answer – you can use pretty much anything.

Long answer – anything you can work with if you know what to do with it.

Not being a full time photographer puts a lot of strain on my options. I can’t always afford to use a professional studio. I can’t always buy any kind of supply I need for my shoots. A lot of times I have to make do with what I have.

You can use folded white bed sheets for solid white background. Better if they are pressed (see problematic spots on the right in the image below) or you can work around it using short depth of field to blow them out of focus (may not work due to short distance to subject).

If you have a spare $50 – you can buy a few foam core sheets at your local Staples/Office Depot (you’ll need one or two if you are shooting portraits, you’ll need more if you’re shooting half or full body). A lot of professionals are actually using them because it’s cheaper than anything with the word “professional” in it.

Alternatively, a lot of bathrooms offer white painted or tiled walls. I’ve shot in plenty of hotel rooms – by lighting them in a specific way you can get anywhere from overexposed white to underexposed gray colors.

Another white alternative is overexposed sky. Put your subject against an open sky, lit it properly – and you’ll have even white background behind.

Black foam core boards can serve as black background. Alternatively – shoot at night with your subject’s back to the darkest background you can find (large window or door). In most cases you should be able to get background close to black while keeping your subject lit.

Any painted wall without major color discrepancies would do the trick. Properly blown out of focus it can give you a nice one-tone backdrop.

Same with the floor – a lot of times a floor would be much more monotone than walls.

Last, but not least – you can make a one-time investment into a chroma key background. With that and a knowledge on how to separate your subject from the background you should be able to superimpose your subject into just about anything.

At the end of the day – it’s experience and knowledge of how photography works that can help you figure out your options. Did you know you can build your own beauty dish for under $10?

It’s not difficult to learn night photography (or low light photography in general), but it’s difficult to master. As with everything else – practice makes perfect.

Here’s a story how I learned my night photography. I was approached by a very talented team wanting to shoot tango dance moves in the streets of NYC. The problem was – neither one of them was a professional dancer, so it took way longer than anticipated. In other words – the photoshoot went way into the night. We picked a spot where we had dancers under a street light and we’ve got this night photography image.

We went back and did a second shoot on a different day. Instead of tango we shot a “west side love story gone wrong” concept. You can see the resulting “Love Story Gone Wrong” image here. Both images were shot around 10 – 11pm.

I had no prior experience shooting during night hours before participating in these photo shoots. However, I had a basic understanding of how low light photography works. There are three parameters you can work with – aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity. You push each one (in that order) to the point when you can’t push it anymore and then you start pushing the next. It’s good to have equipment that can help at night photography – fast lens for wide aperture, tripod for slower shutter speeds and camera that doesn’t have much noise on high ISO settings. The only thing I had was f/2.8 70–200 Sigma lens, D700 camera and slow breathing technique to shoot around 1/60s shutter speed.

I took literally hundreds of shots – I knew some of them would be out of focus due to holding camera in hands (no tripod). I assumed a seated position (look up sniper poses online – there’s very little difference between stabilizing the camera and stabilizing a rifle) and had models to ease into their poses slowly. I used continuous shooting – high speed setting on the camera in order to get as many frames of the proper pose in as little time as possible. For the second shoot – they just acted their “scenes” out in the street and I took as many shots as camera allowed. If I remember correctly D700 allowed 7 or 8 frames per second on high speed and a sequence would fit about 14 before buffer overloaded and camera needed some time to store buffered images onto CF card.

Sometimes, however, you just don’t get lucky to have time to think and prepare – you just get your camera out and shoot without even a moment’s notice. I had over a hundred shots standing in the middle of the pushing crowd and only one came out the way I wanted – it’s the image at the beginning of this answer. This was taken on full manual with bracketing (+/- 1 stop) – because shooting this on auto would have increased shutter speed to the point when everything would have been jittery.

In most cases you, however, can be prepared and even bring your lightning equipment with you. That’s when you can experiment, set up proper lighting and get simple images like this Catwoman (this is shot around 11pm).

This shot of Chicago at night was done around 10 – 11pm from tripod and on slow shutter speed, fast lens (50mm f/1.8) and wide aperture.

And sometimes you get to make night time out of 2pm bright sunny day. Simply because you just won’t have another chance at the scene line this (this is shot during Marcus Hook Pirate Festival in Pennsylvania at around 2 – 4 pm).

In order to get really good images you will end up post processing them – I don’t believe there’s a way around it. Unless you are happy with grainy images with somewhat strange colors – you’ll end up in Photoshop/Lightroom/whatever else you like and you will get them fixed.

Therefore it’s not just the knowledge itself (although I encourage anyone to learn as much as possible) but knowledge plus experience and experimenting that will get you where you want to be.

Building modeling portfolio is tricky. If you look online there are tons of articles advising you to hire a full blown professional team – photographer with assistant, make up artist, hair stylist, fashion or wardrobe stylist and so on. Another ton of articles advise to avoid all these unnecessary expenses and just take a ton of selfies without filters and makeup and send them to as many agencies as possible. Sometimes I see this kind of advice on agencies’ own web site. How should you build your beginner modeling portfolio?

Well, both schools of thought have the right to exist. If you are agency standard – selfies wouldn’t do you wrong. The trick is – different agencies have different standards. By wholesale spamming every agency on the planet with your instagram pics you are effectively communicating that you have no idea what you are doing. As with any job – big or small, career or part time – proper planning and execution will deliver positive results. This is where having a professional photographer helps – he can help you segment types of agencies that might be interested in your type and will help you build your first portfolio to best match with those agencies.

From agency’s point of view your unfiltered images show your raw form and agency saves time and money by not inviting you for a look-see if they have doubts about you. This day and age when every girl with an iPhone and sepia filter thinks she’s a model most agencies are looking for a reason to say “no” to you. They have another 100500 models to look at before lunch time. That’s why your phone pics may not be the best choice. Neither are pictures your friend would take on his or her iPhone just because it’s a latest model.

A professional photographer, especially one that knows how to work with beginner models is a godsend for building out new portfolio. A lot of high level photographers don’t want to bother working with beginners – some because it’s not creative and fulfilling task and they can make same or more money shooting something they actually like, some because they just don’t know how (or, rather, don’t remember) to work with models that are just starting out.

Working with beginner model (regardless of model’s age) is like working with a child. They don’t always listen, they don’t always follow the instructions, they don’t always understand what you want and most of all, they almost always think they know better. Photographer, who is experienced in working with beginners would know how to overcome these obstacles, will be more cooperative and act more like a coach instead of producer. One of the main reasons to hire a photographer who is experienced in building beginner modeling portfolio is his experience building beginner modeling portfolios for many different models. Just because you are beautiful doesn’t mean you know how to model.

I’ll divert a bit. What separates real modeling from instagram modeling? The instagram modeling has a goal of building online presence, score likes, follows, comments and overall online fame. Most of instagram models don’t make a single dollar off of it. The real modeling has a goal of model being part of commercial, artistic or creative process by participating in photo or video shoots for artists, designers, commercials, catalogs, showrooms and the like. Almost all real models are getting paid for their work. Some of them do participate in TFP-based shoots as well, letting their own creative spirit out. Overall they are always a part of a larger process involving multiple creative individuals.

In order to successfully launch your modeling career you must have a portfolio. An agency may spot you from one of the zillion selfies you send out, but the chances of that are slim to none. By providing carefully built portfolio of images that feature your best features and types of modeling you are interested in you are communicating that you are taking your work seriously and agency can rely on you. Photographers and modeling web sites are full with stories of models’ no-shows for commercial and paid photo shoots, thousands of dollars wasted because model didn’t take her role seriously. These no-shows are extremely damaging to any agency’s reputation, so by showing that you had put thought and effort into your portfolio you demonstrating that you will be serious about any jobs agency will send you on. Approach building your portfolio with “this is how we can do business together”, not “look how cute I am in this pic” attitude and agency will have a lot more reasons to hire you.

One more thing to get out of the way – quality of images in your portfolio have nothing to do with the kind of camera the photographer is using. Many times I’ve been asked “what kind of camera are you using? I’ve heard you can only use Nikon/Canon/ for modeling portfolios. Do you have a professional camera?”. Hardest part of this question is not laughing in response. Of course, you shouldn’t settle for an iPhone just because photographer told you so. There is, probably, a few of photographers in US that do shoot on iPhone as a part of Apple’s marketing, but I doubt they’ll do this for beginner modeling portfolio. As long as photographer is using a decent (D)SLR camera that provides adequate image quality – it’s good enough for portfolio.

A more important question is alignment of your own modeling goals and interests (what do YOU want to model?) with photographer’s own interests and experience. For example, oftentimes I would take on a beginner model who is a professional dancer or fitness trainer to get good action or fitness photos, or an actress to get a good character impression – simply because I am interested in working on those concepts and such individuals are a perfect fit for them. Additionally, models themselves are passionate about those concepts and respond better during the photoshoot. On the other hand – using a fitness coach or bodybuilder for a romantic or glamour scene usually doesn’t work very well. It’s not what they are interested in and their posing is almost always off. Of course there are people who are more versatile, but when it comes to beginner models it’s hard to teach them whole modeling book in one photo shoot.

To wrap things up – your beginner model portfolio should be put together by the team. You will need to hire a photographer and a makeup artist, together you will be able to narrow down the concepts you want and would be able to get good 5 – 10 images from an average of 4 – 5 hour photoshoot. Since you are not working on any specific creative concept you can take care of your hair in your regular hair salon (again, after discussing all looks with the team). Your own closet should work most of the time, so you don’t need a wardrobe stylist – at least not for beginner portfolio. Make sure you arrange to have as little retouching as possible as agencies would not want to see over-edited images. Get enough of your beauty sleep the night before, show up on time and ready for work. Remember, modeling is work. The more glamour you see – the more work was put in behind the scenes.

Through my practice as a photographer without any genre boundaries I have heard my share of horrible stories about photo shoots gone wrong because of “nudes”. Or some sort of nudity being involved. I’ve heard models denouncing nude modeling as unprofessional. I’ve had people canceling shoots once they learned their “skin” or “body” in any way will not be fully covered by clothing during the shoot. I actually had one model responding to nude shoot casting call with a proposal of wearing a full nude-colored body suit so that it would look nude, but she won’t actually be nude but would still qualify for implied nude photoshoot.

Let’s start by saying that any professional photographer would respect model’s boundaries. Any professional photographer would let everyone on the team know what the concept of the shoot is, if there is nudity involved and so on. That’s basics of being a professional. The true source of these horror stories are “professional amateurs”. It’s a group of people who also known as “GWC” (as in “guy with camera“) that really have little interest in photography and are merely using it as means of peeking at some extra skin.

The real problem here is model’s own inability to tell the difference between a professional photographer working on a project and a guy with camera looking to have some extra excitement in his boring life. Or reluctance to deny a significant amount of money for an “almost too sleazy, but not quite there yet” photo shoot. If it’s too good to be true it probably is. Time after time my models are telling me pretty much same story: a guy sets up a paid high-end lingerie photo shoot at some questionable location and upon arrival they learn that makeup artist “cancelled at the last moment”, the high end lingerie “did not arrive on time” and this photographer is working on creative project shooting everything on his iPhone. Trying to gradually undress the model in the process.

While these types aren’t going anywhere they are pretty easy to spot and to avoid. The stress and drama could be avoided if a model feels comfortable to check references, review the portfolio and ask questions. There are literally hundreds of articles online on how to avoid being scammed like that. Most of them actually make sense.

Nevertheless, all this drama puts the whole “nude modeling” into a negative light. A lot of models even put something like “if I see nude pictures in your port – don’t talk to me at all” straight in their profiles and their modeling pages. I wonder if Moschino, Christian Dior, J Lo, American Apparel and others will ever be able to convince these models to work with them. Monica Bellucci, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Natalie Portmal, Eva Green (not to mention Kim Kardashian) and Wendy Williams will, of course, quit the industry tomorrow.

There’s too much misunderstanding going around nude, implied nude and semi-nude modeling. There are people that work with porn and erotica concepts, there is whole glamour and boudoir photography section, there is creative and artistic nude section and, of course, there is literally a ton of commercial material with nudity, semi-nudity and implied nudity. Painting anyone who does nude modeling as unprofessional – whether it’s a photographer who shoots nude models or models, who offer to pose nude to photographers or painters – is unprofessional on every level.

Nudity by itself is a very powerful concept. It reaches deep into instincts area (that’s your commercial and erotica nudity), but can also trigger emotional response as creative and artistic nudes do. It affects photographer and model just as strong as the audience they target. They develop a certain level of trust, connecting on a professional level to produce images that will have strong impact on emotional or instinctive level. There’s neither place nor time for inappropriate behavior. By focusing on delivering the best images – either for commercial client or for creative project – they can achieve great results. And that’s what separates professional photographers and models from people who are interested in peek-a-boob games.