Digital Boudoir Photography : A Step-by-step Guide to ... - Ken Gilbert

2 Digital Boudoir Photography
Now the range of what can be considered a boudoir portrait is much wider.
The height of the popularity of boudoir photography
was in the late 1980s. It began dying
out in the 1990s. At one time, many professional
photography studios offered boudoir
photography to their clients. Once the fad
slowed down, many professional studios
dropped it. Now it is much more difficult to
find a professional photographer who is really
good at creating boudoir portraits. Once digital
photography started to become popular after
the beginning of the 21 st century, ordinary
people, mainly men, began taking sexy photographs
of their love interests. The privacy and
immediacy of digital photography along with
the easy distribution of images were the primary
driving forces behind this resurgence. But
boudoir photography has changed. The term
“boudoir photography” can now be applied to
nearly any sexy or sensual portrait of a woman.
Some photographers specialize in a very soft,
sensual style of portrait. Others include artistic
nudes or even glamour nudes, such as what
might be found in men’s magazines. Boudoir
photographs can be revealing, but they don’t
have to be. The usual definition of boudoir
photography implies that it is more soft and
sensual than erotic and sexual. The latter
images are usually called “glamour photographs.”
“Glamour photographs” should not be
confused with the so-called “glamour portraits”
which first appeared in malls in the early
1990s. Glamour portraits can generally be
described as waist-up or head-and-shoulder
portraits of a woman with lots of makeup and
often a very large, teased hairdo. It is a far cry
from the natural-looking boudoir photography
of today. So the definition of boudoir photography
we will stick with throughout this book
is generally soft, sensual, and sexy portraits of a
woman.