This post is going to be my no nonsense guide to give you curvy boudoir photography ideas that will help you capture better photos for your clients. By creating better photos, my hope is that you’ll sell more photos to your client at your reveal sessions which will make your business more profitable.
Ideas I Use To Enhance My Plus Size Clients Photos:
- Enhance Her Body Shape With Effective Posing
- Slim Her Figure With Shadows
- Enhance Her Figure With Flattering Outfits
- Diminish her Sensitive Areas with Props
- Use Composition to Highlight Her Best Features
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Poses That Will Enhance Her Body Shape – Curvy Boudoir Photography Ideas
The over arching idea of posing for boudoir photography is simply to accentuate the woman’s curves. If you can enhance a woman’s curves through direction, you’ll make her look more alluring in her photos.
The way to do this is to direct your client to bring anything you want to highlight closer to the camera. Likewise you’ll direct her to push and twist problem areas away from the camera to diminish them. This is the simplified way I think of posing.
Using these boudoir poses I’m basically trying to get the woman’s figure closer to the hourglass shape men are hardwired to be attracted to. The following are some examples of how I use this idea to enhance my clients body shape.
1. Pose Her On Her Back
Placing curvy women on their backs for boudoir photos is a trick I often use to create a slimming effect. When a woman lies on her back, gravity works in our favor, subtly flattening her tummy. It’s a simple yet effective way to craft a slender look in photos.
Although this pose works well on the floor, I’ve found that positioning a woman at the bed’s edge often yields the best results. Here’s why: it allows her to drape her head slightly backward, giving her face a more flattering angle in the final shot.
After she’s comfortable, I adjust my position so that I’m capturing her from an angle where her face and chest are the main focus. This clever positioning draws the viewer’s eye to these features and away from any areas she may feel self-conscious about, such as her midsection. It’s a strategic approach to emphasize confidence and grace in every shot.
2. Shoot Slightly Above Her Eye Line
Photographing your client from above their eyeline emphasizes her face and bust over her tummy, shifting attention away from areas she may feel insecure about. This angle is one of the many curvy boudoir photography ideas that help celebrate a woman’s shape by creating a flattering and slimming effect, perfect for those who wish to accentuate these features.
This idea of shooting down on curvy women is very slimming and flattering from many different positions. Additionally most curvy women will have enough volume in their bust to do this pose lying on their back without diminishing the size of their breasts to a negative degree. Alternatively, you can also shoot down on your client from a kneeling or side saddle position for a very similar effect.
3. Get Her Arms Away From Her Body
Curvy women often feel self-conscious about their upper arms because they tend to carry extra body fat in that area. If a woman’s arm presses against her body, the upper arm looks wider. I’ve found that asking my clients to hold their upper arm just an inch away from their torso can significantly slim its appearance, as it won’t spread out against their side.
Moreover, encouraging actions like playing with hair or adjusting a necklace can elegantly position her arms for the shoot. Such simple moves not only create dynamic images but also contribute to the arm’s slimmer look. This strategy has an added benefit: it helps the subject relax, which often results in more natural and attractive photos. Also, positioning arms with intention helps to create angles and shadows that define the arm muscles better, contributing to a more toned look in the final image.
4. Make Her Hip Bigger To Slim Her Waist
If your client has nice wide hips you can use pose her on her side and have her bring her knee around over her lower knee. This will make her hip look larger then if she put her knee behind her. Thus, by making her hip look bigger, you can make her waist look smaller by comparison.
Note that this idea works best on women with wider hips so women with narrower hips might not be enhanced by this pose.
5. Pose Her Legs To Block Her Tummy
Since most curvy women are self conscious of their tummy area, a good way to help give her cover is to block the area with her legs or arms. My favorite way to use the legs as cover is to direct her pose from a seated position. Then you can direct her into a position where her knees block the view of her tummy from the cameras perspective.
Using this same concept, you can also block your clients tummy from standing, kneeling or all fours by positioning her hands and arms so they obscure her tummy. No matter how you choose to do it the concept is the same. If she has an area she’s self conscious about, hide it using the pose and other parts of her body.
Master The Art of Posing Women
In this guide I’ll show you how to pose the nude female form in a way that tastefully flatters her body type and creates emotion. This guide is intended for beginner and intermediate photographers and will teach you how to balance the proportions of any woman to make her look her best.
By first teaching you the fundamentals of posing, these principals will help you progress to a point where you can confidently pose any woman in an improvised fashion.
Using Shadows To Slim Her Figure – Curvy Boudoir Photography Ideas
One of my best curvy boudoir photography ideas is to use shadows too help slim out a woman’s figure. This can be done using natural light in the clients home or your studio. The trick is to get your client as close to the window (or other light source) as possible. This is because the closer you are to the light source, the deeper the shadows will be.
If you want to obscure your clients form with extra dark shadows, you can take this idea a step further and pose them into full sun. If you’re skilled at posing, you can use full unfiltered sunlight to block areas of your clients body in shadow that she might be self conscious about.
If it’s a cloudy day or you can’t find natural light to utilize this technique, you can also create your own lighting, using specific light modifiers. Note that you’ll have a greater variety of modifiers available to you if you use a monolight flash. An example of a high end monolight would be the Profoto B10, however, you can also adequately modify something like a Godox AD600BM for a very similar look at a fraction of the cost.
Specifically you’ll want to use modifiers that utilize grids and or barn doors. Grids and other Fresnel like modifiers will contain the light and create moody shadows that you can then pose your client into. The following are some light modifiers you can check out if you want to use this technique on an upcoming photoshoot.
Examples Of Light Modifiers That Will Create Deep Shadows
Use Lingerie To Enhance Her Figure – Curvy Boudoir Photography Ideas
Arguably the single best way to improve the figure of a curvy woman is to help her choose lingerie that will enhance her hourglass shape. You can help your client come up with flattering boudoir outfit ideas for plus size bodies by reviewing this post.
The basic idea is that you’ll want to help her choose outfits that highlight her best assets while diminishing the areas she’s self conscious about. For curvy women this generally means selecting lingerie that will enhance her hourglass shape or at the very least give her tummy some concealment.
For women that need aggressive shaping, corsets will make the biggest improvement to the woman’s shilloutte of all lingerie styles available. For plus size women that just need some light shaping or a little bit of cover for their tummy, the following lingerie styles can also significantly improve your clients body.
Curvy Boudoir Outfit Ideas
Using Props To Diminish Her Sensitive Areas – Curvy Boudoir Photography Ideas
Another really effective idea I use to photograph curvy women is to conceal their sensitive areas using props. Now in my mind the word “prop” conjures cheesy boudoir photos where the woman is holding a teddy bear or something. In reality though, I use props all the time to help enhance my clients form.
To do this I usually try to use things in the space around me as props. For example, a common thing almost everyone will have available to them is a bed sheet. Often times I’ll use the sheets of the bed as a prop to help accentuate my clients form. Sheets are great because you can place them around the woman to cut into her form and slim her out.
Another way to utilize this idea is to pose your client into a chair with arm rests. Once you pose her into a flattering position, you can then position yourself so the arm of the chair blocks her tummy.
To site yet another example of the same idea, I’ll often pose my client somewhere and have decorations or architecture in the space block parts of her body from my camera’s perspective. If you decide to try this technique I generally find that it’s best to have her not look into the camera. This will help sell a compelling voyeuristic look while offering her the concealment she needs.
Use Composition To Highlight Her Best Features – Curvy Boudoir Photography Ideas
One of the most powerful concepts you can put into practice when photographing boudoir is the idea of controlling what the viewer focuses on using composition. To simplify this idea, when framing your shot if you (or your client) don’t like something, simply crop it out of the shot. If you can’t crop it, you can instead hide the area using a prop or the pose as mentioned earlier.
A common way I use this technique to crop out problem areas is by using long focal length lenses. This allows me to focus in on my clients best features while cropping out the areas she’s worried about.
Another way I use this technique is to selectively highlight and exclude things using depth of field. By choosing a wide aperture (like f2.8 or f1.4 depending on the lens) I can put the focus where I want the viewers eyes drawn to.
In short, what you include in the frame is just as important as what you choose to crop out or diminish. Get creative and try highlighting areas of her body or create bodyscapes of her features.
With these detail shots, you can offer a more diverse final collection to her. In particular these detail shots tend to sell really well as wall art. In my experience few women think they’d ever want to hang a nude picture of themselves up in their home, but if you can make it artful and anonymous, most will love the idea.
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I hope this post helped give you some genuinely helpful curvy boudoir photography ideas for your upcoming session. My hope is that these ideas will help you create a better, more diverse collection of images to offer to your client. If you found this post helpful you can support future content by checking out the links mentioned on this page.
