Soft & Sensual Photography: Boudoir Style Involved

Sensual, seductive, hinting classy and elegant.
Soft series are more sensitive and elegant than bold glamour portraiture and nudity is more often implied than explicit.

Creating sensual series means, taking variations of candid and posed photographs of the subject partly dressed or in lingerie.

In my opinion, “sensual” also stands as a synonym for an aspect of “boudoir photography”.

Soft Light Quality is Crucial

Without a doubt, the character of light is important – it can also be described as quality. For this look, the light quality has to be very soft (low-contrast shadows).
It does not matter whether the series is created with daylight, flash or mixed. Most important is rather that the lighting is soft, flattering and even.

I captured this series on location and the actual idea was to combine incident daylight with scattered flash light in order to achieve a nice balance and smooth room illumination. Unfortunately it rained that day and the natural daylight was simply too weak to fulfill the requirements I had for this whole scene. So I had to fully rely on my lighting equipment…

Strobe & Softbox: Not Always Soft Enough

But strobes (irrelevant which form & size) basically emits hard light (= creating harsh shadows) which does not comply with the character of this look at all.
On this set I could not bounce because the walls with their various colors would have caused quite a strange color temperature mix. On top of that, the ceiling was paneled with dark brown wood. You get the picture, right?

Therefore, my biggest light former I had on set was put to use: an octobox with 120 cm/4’ diameter.
The problem that now presented itself was the short distance between flash head and model. The light beam could simply not spread wide enough to create a huge soft light cloud.

What to do now?

Easy but Ingenious Solution: The Shower Curtain

My friend and fellow photographer Michael Zelbel uses shower curtains in a very skillful and formidable way in order to eliminate any kind of hardness created by the light source (= it scatters light). Since I saw him applying this trick, 2 cheap plastic IKEA shower curtains crown my lighting equipment collection at all times so I can build an improvised light wall if needed 🙂

Of course they swallow quite some light power but when working with monolights this really does not matter – the devices are strong enough to even this out…

So this led me to the following lighting setup:

1. Octobox (120 cm/4’) is creating the first diffusion.
2. Place a shower curtain in front of it to serve as the ultimate light softener and produce a bigger volume at the same time (= extensive light source).

In addition, I decided to go with a higher ISO-value which provided me with the perfect combination that I needed in order to let the weak daylight immerse and merge the artificial light cloud into the desired light volume.

In the following, I would like to further elaborate about posing details, the compositions related to them and the emotions resulting from them. The conscious control of the visual concept (that actually defines the look in the end) in combination with the right framing and corresponding lens (+ open aperture) is key.

Posing: Model Concentric-Concept

In posing we fully concentrate on mood and message. It’s a very model concentric-concept.
In general, poses have to be minimalistic. The subject is showing soft lines, nothing extreme. It has something flowing, round, and comfy about it.
But direct your subject without letting the scene appear to be static.

Lighting Gear & Specs Used

• 1x Monolight 400 Ws @400 Ws
• 1x Octobox (120 cm/4’) – w/Grid
• 2x Plastic Shower Curtain 180x200cm/6×6.5’

Camera Gear & Specs Used

• Full frame
• 35-200mm
• f/1.8-3.5
• 1/60
• ISO 640
• 4900°K