proPhotogs

The Lovers’ holiday has come and gone for this year, but take heart! There’s still plenty of love to go around.

Ok, puns aside, I think many of us are looking for ways to vamp up our bookings.   How about adding Boudoir to your offerings? Or if you already offer it, it’s time to promote it, hot and heavy!  Really, that was the last pun.  

There are a lot of ways to go about this.  The one I like?  Book a hotel room (swanky, not skanky!). Explain who you are and what you’re doing, and ask for a day rate, since you don’t need it overnight (really, explain yourself, otherwise, they might get the wrong idea…).  Put out a model call, see if anyone bites.  Grab a bottle of wine, find a hair dresser and makeup artist, and figure out if you can work together on a Boudie session. (Hey, it’s always best to test the wine before the big night, right?!)

Meet your models at the hotel, offer them some wine, pamper them a bit while you get set up.  Pick up one of those paraffin hand waxers – they’re about $40 – let them dip their hands while they get their hair and makeup done.   With the wine and wax, they’ll be relaxed and ready to be sultry for you in no time.  

Some other nice touches?  Bring some linens with you, whatever kind fit the look you’re going for – satin, cotton, printed, plain.   Network with a local jeweler and see if you can borrow some jewelery to feature in the photos (thanks to Andrea on the Forum for that idea!).  Put together a package specifically for the Boudie shoot.  Including a book for the nightstand or a nice canvas for the bedroom wall is a good plan.  It keeps your bottom line where you want it and will wow the clients.  

If you’ve not offered this in the past, make sure you’re getting signed model releases (find examples by searching the Forum!).  Make sure you’re charging appropriately for your experience and abilities (read:  if you’ve never done it and you’re not sure how it’s going to turn out, make it a freebie for the first couple times you try).  If you’re confident in your abilities, but Boudoir is new for you, offer a discount to the first few clients in exchange for the model release.  And if all of this is old hat, spice things up!  Plan a hotel Boudie shoot and try something new.  Run a promotion for it, keep things interesting and fill out your bookings at the same time.

Now let’s change it up.  Instead of telling me your secrets to a successful Boudoir session, let’s come at this from the point of view of the client.  If you were getting your own Boudie’s done, what would put you at ease and ensure the best images?  Come on now, I know some of you on the forum have had them done, so let’s hear it!

Today I got an e-mail forward that I had to share with this group (don’t stop reading).
It was a photo of the Obama inauguration taken using technology developed by a company called Gigapan. Their product is basically a camera mount that swivels mechanically and shoots to create wildly detailed panoramic images. You just tell it where you want the corners of your photo to be and it pans up-and-down and side-to-side to take it all in.
When the gizmo is done with its work, you are left with a whole bunch of standard shots, in whatever resolution your camera can muster. Then the Gigapan software stitches them all together to create a huge image. The result is an image that is 1000+megapixels.
In the Obama photo, you can zoom in and pick out faces from waaaay back in the crowd. It’s the kind of thing that would have gotten one of the Full House kids in trouble when they were cutting school.
“DJ…….would you please come take a look at this Google Earth image and tell me again where you were on Saturday?”
Anyway, if you went to the inauguration and remember where you were standing, you could probably find yourself in this photo – pretty wild.
But (speaking of 80s television), you don’t have to take my word for it. Check it out at http://www.gigapansystems.com/ .