Female Nude Photography - For Everyone

Firstly, what is the difference between nude photography and boudoir photography?

I really hope this page, and indeed this whole website will give you the impetus to start taking nude or boudoir photographs.

If you want more detailed information then Ashley Karyl's ebook How to Photograph Nudes Like a Professional is a good next step; at 325 pages it goes into far more detail than I can here.

Excellent question! I'm probably going to get letters about this, but here's how I am going to make the distinction. Though boudoir photographs often include nudity, their focus is on the beauty, glamour and sensuality of the model. Artistic nude or fine art nude photography, on the other hand, focuses on the grace and beauty of the female form itself. The images generally aren't glamourous and often don't even include the model's face... it is the female figure which is used to create the composition.

Now it has to be said that fine art nude modelling is an art in itself; even within the modelling world, there aren't too many models that can pull off the elegant and sculptural poses with any level of success.

I personally find the best figure photography to be absolutely beautiful - few things stop me in my tracks quite as quickly - but for the purposes of this site, I am going to narrow things down into a few styles which are achievable by anyone. Even those without the figure of a catwalk model or the flexibility of a gymnast!

Abstracts

The goal here is to create flattering, artistic nude shapes without necessarily showing anything too rude! There are a couple of techniques for doing this.

Shadows

By placing the light to the side or behind the model you will create interesting shapes in the boundary between the light and dark. This is a great slimming technique too - if the eye cannot see the whole figure the brain is very forgiving.

Two things to note though:

• It is quite difficult to get this balance between light and dark right. Firstly you need a darkened room and secondly you need a directional light source (one that doesn't bounce light into the parts of the scene you want to keep dark).
• Be wary of stretch marks, dimpling etc when back lighting; back lighting emphasises textures.

The good news is that the digital darkroom can help enormously with both problems:

• Using Exposure/Curves/Layers/Brightness & Contrast controls you can often finish off the creative process - even if you couldn't get the room completely dark, or stop the light spilling completely you can correct things digitally.
• As everyone knows, Photoshop can fix blemished skin too - but my advice is to avoid this level of recovery if you can; it can take hours!

Highlights

You can use the same technique in reverse too - very high key shots can be deliberately over exposed to to the point where elements disappear. This can again be very slimming: in the picture of Lindsay to the right, see how the highlights along each side of the body get subtracted from her silhouette to make her seem extra slim.

Framing/Cropping

The last technique I am going to feature here involves cropping in extra close on particular areas of the body to create intriguingly abstract shapes and landscapes.