Look! Lori and Aleks made me look glamorous!! That is some bonafide miracle working right there, my friends.
On the afternoon of the shoot, I showed up to the Center City studio with a ridiculously huge bag of clothes and props in tow, plus one big dramatic fur coat and a smaller fox stole. I had a vague notion of the sequence I wanted to do ("you meet a lady in a hotel bar and she turns out to be not too nice" / "in this shoot I will be playing a giant bitch who is perpetually unimpressed with everybody, which is to say, I'll be myself"), but it was mostly just to keep myself on track and semi-focused while Lori and Aleks did all the real work.
Both of them were so warm and easygoing that I immediately felt like we'd been friends forever, which is a really crucial and underappreciated talent for boudoir teams. Think about it: these ladies make their living getting women -- most of whom they've never met before, and many of whom are probably at least a little bit nervous about stripping down and showing their stuff for posterity -- to relax and have fun in front of the camera. That's hard! That takes some special interpersonal skills!
Which Lori and Aleks have, in addition to being really awesome at photography and makeup, respectively.
I have had some not-so-great experiences with other makeup artists in the past. I once flew out to Colorado for a photoshoot that ended up being completely unusable because the stylist (who was, to be fair, a newbie just starting out) stuck me with orange foundation, blue eyeshadow, and curls stiffer than mattress springs. I still don't have any pictures from my formal wedding album because I never liked the makeup from that day, either.
Because of these prior experiences, I was a little gunshy with Aleks. I shouldn't have been. That lady is a genius and master of her art, and although I was probably the worst kind of "augh oh no!" flinch-ful client while she was working on me, once she was through it was clear that I should have shut up and let her do her magic in peace. Because she did a great, great job. It was everything I'd hoped for and then some.
And then we took a bunch of pictures! and it was really fun! and I was never self-conscious even a little bit (how could I be, when they handled everything with such matter-of-fact ease?), and both Lori and Aleks were super attentive to detail throughout, catching every little glitch (smudged eyeliner, a bit of dirt on my foot) that might have threatened to make the pictures anything less than perfect.
The studio, by the way, is a fun little lesson in how selective framing and picture cropping can make a small and relatively empty space stand in for a number of sets. There's a lot of sleight-of-hand that goes on behind the scenes in how the furniture and backdrops are arranged. It's pretty neat to see in person.
Lori helped me through some poses and made it very easy to fake being an Actual Model, and at the end of the day I got to look over the raw shots on her computer and pick out which ones I wanted.
The hardest part was narrowing it down to just a few (well, relatively a few). But that's okay. I can always go back and take some more, right?
From start to finish, including picture review and selection, the whole thing took about five hours. We shot two sets, each with its own outfit and mini-storyline. All of these are from the first set; I'll post a picture from the other one next time I get to talking about boudoir.
All told, it was a fabulous experience and I can't wait until I get to shoot with them again.
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