The First Spicy Couples Session
When you first starting shooting boudoir, you learn it’s all about boundaries. Most of the time when you talk about boundaries you’re referring to your clients boundaries. After an amount of time you start realizing that you have boundaries as a photographer. When you do something that causes people to challenge their boundaries, after a while the natural tendency is to start looking at your own. One of my personal boundaries for a long time was not to shoot any genitalia. I had realized after a while that this was flawed thinking. How could I ask my clients to love all of themselves but not that one part? So naturally I started looking at ways to challenge my own boundaries and see why I had the boundaries that I stuck by.
Over the years I have been asked to do couples sessions that were more intimate and had turn them down because it went against the boundaries I had set. But after some self-reflection I couldn’t really figure out a reason why I had set those boundaries. I set off on our journey to challenge them. I reached out on social media and asked for brave couples to volunteer and if I’m being honest the response was kind of overwhelming. I had expected to only get one maybe two couples that were interested and it was honestly overwhelming the amount of people that reached out. But after discussing the shoots and schedules with each of the couples Emily and Chad stood out as a great first time for me.
So with the shoot booked and the day picked I set out to prepare myself and realized it there really wasn’t preparing for this kind of photo shoot because I didn’t really know what was going to happen. I mean I knew the goal and I knew what we were working towards but I didn’t really know how it was going to work out. And I think nervous was an understatement. One of the good things about my life is that it’s normally really busy so I don’t get much time to sit and think about things to the point where it starts doing damage to me. So sooner than I knew the date of the shoot was upon us. I headed to the studio and walk in to meet these two amazing people for the first time. To ease things off we started to work with just Emily doing a just standard boudoir shoot.
Emily very quickly was able to get past the initial nervousness and create some truly amazing photos. It was amazing to talk to her and her share that the main reason for wanting to do the shoot was to help her battle against her own body image struggles. She’s just like any of the rest of us, learning to deal with what life and love does to a body after a number of years. Even though the fruits of life and love are great, some days it makes it hard to find that extra love for ourselves.
It was amazing to see the dynamic changed once we brought Chad into the photo shoot. It was amazing just to see how His passion was visible for her. And in the same respect the calm the Emily seem to feel when she was close to him.
You know you see a lot of things on movies and you see actors that show you what you think passion looks like but man I can tell you this much once those two stepped in the room it was amazing to see it in real life. As a shoot progressed and the scenes changed it was almost like Chad was in my head, I would be thinking you need to move like this or do that and it was almost like he read my mind and just did it. It was amazing to see these two fawn over each other and just love each other.
Halfway through I started wondering if I was even going to be able to do these to Justice by taking these pictures, would they even be able to show what it was like when you were in the room with these two. I think the biggest thing that I ended up realizing is that even though I was photographing two people having sex it wasn’t pornographic. It was more just watching raw physical passion unfolded itself.
So as for pushing boundaries I think we all won with this shoot. I can say that this shoot turned me into a believer of the ‘don’t knock it till you try it’ motto. It showed me with the right person, passion is a real thing. Being able to express your love physically is amazing and something I’d began to doubt the power of. I hope to be able to do more of these in the future. So thank you Chad and Emily…
