Professional Photographer to the Rescue: natural, beautiful boudoir photography

jmeyer | Photography Tips | Portraits | 08/02/2013 12:57pm

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Our professional photographer’s recommended gear

Prime lenses
Kate uses zooms for weddings, but for boudoir prime lenses are your best friends. “I just use natural light and often restrict this in order to create the shadows that I want. This means you need fast lenses. I typically shoot with an aperture of f/2, which gives the softness in the out-of-focus areas that even pro zooms couldn’t give you. I use three Nikon primes: an 85mm, a 50mm and a 35mm.”

Make-up artist
A great make-up artist (or MUA) is essential. Cat (visit Cat’s website to see her range of services) does 90% of my shoots. It is an optional extra for the sitter – they pay £125 direct to Cat .

For male photographers, a great MUA is even more important. You really need to get hands-on with boudoir photography, so that you get the subject’s limbs and body parts in exactly the right place. A good make-up girl can do this under your direction.

Lowepro Pro Roller X200
I carry around all my kit in the one roller bag. This LowePro model costs £280/$350 and the telescopic handle and wheels mean it is so easy to take everything with me. Every lens, flash, camera body and accessory has its slot, so I can make sure everything is packed and ready for a shoot.

Lensbaby Composer Pro
This is one of my most recent acquisitions. I’ve found that the selective blur it gives is great for certain wedding shots but is also absolutely brilliant for boudoir. The distortion allows you to mask parts of the body, and creates a completely fresh look to your pictures.

For a fun effect, it is expensive – the basic Composer Pro kit that creates selective blur is £299/$300. But I also use the slot-in Effect 80 optic for more pronounced selective depth of field, which costs an extra £299/$300.

PAGE 1: Meet our professional photographer and apprentice
PAGE 2: Boudoir photography tips for during the shoot
PAGE 3: Final tips from our professional photographer
PAGE 4: Our professional photographer’s recommended gear
PAGE 5: Shot of the Day