Ariel | Studio Boudoir

When it comes to hair color and personality, Ariel was one of our most fun clients we’ve had the privilege of working with here at Bourbon and Pearls Boudoir! Let’s start with a couple shots featuring our whiskey barrel setup. The first image is our standard “lean over the barrel” and face the camera pose. This one is always a winner for any client wanting to show off front-facing assets. We also like to use the barrel top with a similar pose to showcase special bottles of bourbon that clients bring with them or even cakes for our special birthday sessions.

The second shot is one we also like to create with clients sitting on the floor with a back toward the barrel. I usually scale down to a single light to make the lighting even more dramatic. I learned a new word while writing this. It’s skiagraphy. This is a Greek term that combines the word for shadow (skia) with the word for writing (graphy). It literally means writing with shadows, and that expresses so much of what I do with my lighting as a professional boudoir photographer. (As you probably know, photography literally means writing (graphy) with light (photo). Ariel’s images are compelling in part because of where the light and where the shadows fall. Of course, there’s also Ariel. And without her in the image, we’d just have a couple of barrels…

We continued to work in a dark environment in part so we could make Ariel’s bright green hair color pop in the photos when contrasted to the background. Loved how these turned out. Ariel’s facial expressiveness created a lot of depth to these images. Of course, we played a bit with the lollipop as we often do for our sessions. The final image features Ariel on one of our whiskey barrels with her back against the Bad Bitches Only fabric hung in the red corner. That corner is now bright white and home to our claw-foot, cast-iron bathtub.

We loved Ariel’s session so much that we ordered a few sample products our studio featuring images from her session.