26th January 2013

Boudoir workshop with Eliza Claire @ The Photography Farm, West Sussex

I was very pleased when a friend told me about a boudoir workshop that was being held by wedding photographer Eliza Claire this week – it took place at The Photography Farm in West Sussex, which does fabulous workshops and master classes for photographers to improve their skills and boost their business.

The photography Farm consists of 12 acres of farmland and a beautiful rustic character manor house with very uneven floors and even hole-in-the-wall doorways halfway up flights of stairs leading to bedrooms! And I hear it has many activities including a pool house for those who are lucky enough to stay there. And they also do amazing home cooked food and scrummy cakes, which we were fed in between shooting & studying!

So Eliza started the day by telling us all about the world of boudoir photography – who our clients might be and why they might want to do a boudoir shoot. Eliza said most of her clients do it for themselves, not for their partners, as a boost of body confidence to make them feel good about themselves. I can speak as a photographer and boudoir client because I had my own shoot done last year with Nicola Grimshaw-Mitchell from My Boudoir, and know what an amazing experience it is and well worth doing. It’s not just about the finished images, it’s about the whole experience – it’s like a fabulous girly pamper day, getting your hair and makeup done and being made to feel like an amazing model. It’s so important to make the client feel like they are amazing and so worth it, because they are!

It’s reinforced an idea I had of doing girly boudoir party’s, where a bunch of girls can get together at a hotel, open a bottle of bubbly, get their hair and makeup done and get some fabulous images taken for themselves – then they are all made up for a night out after if they want to go out on the town with their new found confidence! Watch this space and get in touch if you’d like to do a girly boudoir party!

Then our lovely model arrived after having had her hair and makeover so we could start taking photos. When I say model, she wasn’t actually a model at all – she was a mum who had never posed for a boudoir shoot and was very nervous!! We soon put her at ease though, and it was so much fun – there were 6 girls all in the room and we all took it in turn to do a few photos and had a bit of a giggle (at our own expense).

Eliza Claire uses all natural light and likes to use a very narrow depth of field for her photos, so a lot of the body is out of focus – hiding all the lumps and bumps that people don’t want to see. I shot in RAW black and white, and decided I really liked most of the images in black and white, so kept a lot of them like that and think it’s very flattering and artistic.

I’d say Eliza’s style is quite different from mine, I tend to use more artificial light as well as natural light, but it was nice to incorporate some of that into my images and see a new way of doing things. Plus we got to take away a goody bag that included lots of fabulous photoshop retouching actions to improve the look of skin etc., and a beautiful little self-adhesive album by Finao to put whatever images we’d like inside – well worth the money paid I reckon!