I’m in lots of boudoir photographer groups on Facebook, and I often see photographers sharing “selfies”, or self-portraits. I’m always super jelly because they look amazing and everyone knows how hard they are to accomplish. I don’t have a tripod or a shutter remote for my camera, so I’ve held off attempting the infamous boudoir selfie…until now.
I guess it’s been on my mind, or maybe I needed a confidence boost, or maybe I was just feeling myself, but after I put my son down for a nap this afternoon, I was up in the studio putting on clean sheets and tidying up and I thought, you know what, bish? Challenge accepted.
I had no makeup on and desperately needed to wash my hair, but I didn’t care. I quickly changed into a lingerie set (one of the only ones that I personally own, actually) and started to brainstorm how I was going to make this work. I set my camera on the bed and pointed it at the chaise lounge. Too low. I grabbed the boxes from my album samples and threw those under there. That will work!
I went into my camera menu to see if I could remember how to set up the automatic timer. I set it to start 5 seconds after I hit “go” with 10 sets of 2 shots every 5 seconds. I was totally winging it.
I pushed “OK” and leapt onto the chaise in what was a quite unflattering way. I know this for a fact because the first two shots of the set captured my moves. 🙄😬 I tried to channel every sexy pose that I instruct my clients to do, but my mind was pretty much blanking. After the shutter stopped clicking after what seemed like an eternity of me flopping around like a fish out of water, I ran to the back of the camera to check the damage.
WHOA! Better than I thought! Sure, I wasn’t framed quite right and the focus wasn’t where I was hoping for, but I had made my body do some of the things I was willing it to!
Now I was encouraged to try another set. I had these portraits in my head that I wanted to capture but wasn’t sure how to do it. After LOTS of back and forth between the camera and my spots, I was satisfied enough to stop for the day (plus, I was sweaty and tired as hell). I was giddy with excitement to get these off of the card and onto my computer.
As I reviewed them, I saw lots of things wrong with the images…but surprisingly, almost none of the critiques had to do with ME, but were on the composition, lighting, focus, etc. I was proud of what I had done and felt like a pretty badass mama.
So what did I do next? Well, I went and woke my husband up from the nap HE was taking on the couch, of course! Confidence booster for the win!
(These images have not been retouched. Trying to keep it real with ya.)