Posing like a freaking goddess: Do's and Don't's

"Do I have to know my poses for my shoot?" "What do I do with my hands?!" "Oh f*ck, I'm so awkward, I can't do this!" - All totally normal thoughts you may have before your session, don't worry you're not alone! Chances are, most of you haven't done something like this before, it's common to be nervous and worry about how you'll look during your shoot. But don't fret because I'm here to tell you some secrets:

1. You are a damn goddess and you will look sexy as hell no matter what.

2. Just to put your mind at ease, with the help of my lovely model- Lisa McDougall, we've created a list of some boudie posing basics. Read on for some simple posing tips and tricks for how to ROCK your boudie session ;).

Alright, let's take it from the top... of your head! First stop: Forehead. Probably not what you think about when it comes to posing but your forehead (and the rest of your face) really counts when it comes to posing!

Sometimes it's a natural reaction to scrunch up your forehead like when you're looking up with your eyes or you're trying to open your eyes more. Although you're posing your eyes the correct way, if you're not careful and aware of your facial muscles, you could end up really flexing those forehead wrinkles.

Give it a try: on the count of three give me a sexy smile with big, bright eyes.

For reals, you, reading this right now, you ready?

Right into your phone camera.

ONE.

TWO.

THREE.

SEXY SMIIILLEE!!!

Now feel your facial muscles, or even better take a picture!

Did you raise your eyebrows at all? If so, take a second to relax those muscles and feel that relaxed forehead. Play with it in the mirror and get used to scanning your muscles: checking what should be relaxed and what should be tensed. Almost every muscle in your face should be relaxed, except your eyes. Keep your eyes engaged but still sultry. Our model does an excellent job with her eyes but scroll back up and take a peak at her mouth. Her lips are pursed tightly together; not quite smiling but not quite relaxed and sexy either. Try to keep your mouth relaxed if you're not smiling. Let your mouth open a little bit, you can even try keeping the tip of your tongue gently pressed against the roof of your mouth. Tilting your chin upwards to elongate your neck and accentuate your jaw line is also really important.

As you can see above, squishing your chin in can have some, not so flattering results. While it might not be your first reaction to strike a pose as over-exaggerated as I had Lisa pose in those photos it is common to accidentally hide your neck when I tell you to look down.

You want to make sure your neck is always visible as it helps to define your jaw line better and allows us to see that beautiful face much more clearly. Let's have Lisa tilt her head back so we can see her neck but keep her eyes closed (or looking at her cheeks) to maintain that relaxed, sultry look.

Now that Lisa's face is in absolute sex goddess mode, everything else looks pretty tame or even boring doesn't it? Let's get that gorgeous body matching that gorgeous face now!

Ou baby, hands are engaged and it has improved this pose drastically! Having your hands busing doing something is so important. A sense of movement or tension is what gives an image "life" and makes it feel more real. For this pose I probably told Lisa something like"now pretending you're running your hands through your hair". Try to think of these prompts like actions to do rather than poses to hold. A great way to increase the different number of looks you can achieve without having to move a lot is by changing your hands and arms. Even just sitting down there's a lot of options of what to do with your hands!

Try creating asymmetry with your body; don't always do the same thing with both sides of your body. Don't be afraid to put one arm up, one arm down. One shoulder higher than the other. Whatever you feel like trying, do it! Practice in the mirror, figure out what looks good!

Another prompt you'll hear often is "play with your bra strap". This is anther one of those "creating movement" tricks. The other hand is near Lisa's mouth; having a hand close to or in your mouth gives a very sexy, suggestive feel that looks fantastic in boudoir images!

So now that we have most of the upper body posing down pat, let's move onto the rest of it! Next up: all over boudie body basics!

Here's the most plain, boring pose I could possibly think of. All of her muscles are relaxed and her body is completely symmetrical. Ask anyone who's done a shoot with me; if you're comfortable, you're probably not doing it right. Your boudoir session is going to be a full hour and a bit of holding difficult, awkward poses that make you use muscles you didn't even know you had. I warn you now, you will be sore the next day. No matter how fit you think you are, there's no escaping the dreaded morning after boudoir muscles ;).

The easiest thing to fix right off the bat is this angle; a straight on shot usually only works if everything else if incredibly asymmetrical. Boudoir is all about accentuating those curves. It's hard to see Lisa's beautiful curves with a symetrical, straight on shot like that. To keep things simple, let's have Lisa just turn to the side.

Now we're starting to see some curves but she still looks far too comfortable and we can't have that!

Pop the leg= pop the booty. Perfect we got some booty shape in here now! One problem though, booty's in the dark! How are we supposed to see beautiful curves if they're in the dark?! Let's turn this beauty to the other side.

We have the booty popped out, we can see it in the light, but even the part in the shadows is still important to having a great pose! Even though they're in the dark a little, it's still important to accentuate those curves and push that chest to ceiling!

Now we have leg and booty popped, chest to the ceiling, hands engaged, and a sense of movement! Looks like we've ticked all the boxes. Once you're in a great pose your job is to hold that as long as humanly possibly while I run around like a crazy person getting as many different angles and lighting set ups as I can!

You'll often see me laying on the ground, standing on my tip toes, squeezing into corners, running from one side of the room to the other, hiding behind the door or the plants and climbing up and down on my step stool for different angles. This higher angle is great for outlining those beautiful curves. I also had Lisa close her eyes for this one since her face is a little bit shadowed. Now let's play with this pose a little and see what kind of new looks we can create.

Alright so I said boudoir photography is all about capturing and accentuating curves. Putting your hands around the smallest part of your waist can create a nice curve but squeezing too hard can create an unnatural look. It also pushes the shoulders to an awkward angle so let's avoid that!

Not only did we fix Lisa's hands for this pose but notice since it's straight-on, we've also added another couple details to really enhance this pose. Her head is turned towards the light so we can actually see that beautiful face. This also helps to create that asymmetry we were talking about earlier. To further the asymmetry Lisa has one shoulder slightly more forward than the other, one leg popped, and one hip out further than the other. Her hands are resting naturally on the smallest part of her waist and we have some gorgeous curves going on now! Let's move to a different pose now; a classic boudoir chair pose.

My initial instructions for this pose are usually something simple like "sit on the chair close to the edge then lean back far enough for your head to touch the back of the chair". Even though it's not quite what I want the pose to look like, I'd rather make a series of minor adjustments rather than bombard you with a million instructions at once so don't worry about getting any poses perfect right from the start, almost no one does!

The most noticeable thing we can fix first is the legs. We always want to show those gorgeous legs off and make them look as long as possible. As beautiful and long as Lisa's legs are looking above, you can't help to notice that it kind of looks like she only has one leg passed her knees. This bring us to one of my most used phrases during a session "offset your feet!"

Having one leg out a little further than the other, allows us see both legs more clearly and it makes those legs look even longer. Moving onto the next most common phrase you'll hear during your session, "chest to the ceiling!"

Wow! What a difference that makes! If you need convincing that sore back the next day will be worth it, here it is! This pose looks absolutely gorgeous now, let's see what we could do to change this look a little bit.

A simple, little pose change, like just moving Lisa's hands to the back of the chair gives a whole new life to this pose. What a goddess!! Since Ms. Lisa used to be a dancer, she didn't even have to think about what her toes were doing, pointing obviously! For most of you though....

Another little reminder you'll frequently here from me is "point your toes!". As a former gymnastics coach, I'm definitely not afraid to overuse that phrase so get used to it ;). Although I had Lisa really exaggerate the flex in her foot, you can see how distracting those feet are. A part of creating curves in boudoir, is also creating smooth and cohesive "lines" in your image. Lisa's legs have these gorgeous lines going all the way down but then we hit her feet and their lines are going in a perpendicular direction! Those harsh lines tend to draw our eye toward them. In this pose, that is clearly not the lines we want to be focused on so we need to keep toes pointed to keep that flow of lines smooth and curvy.

Up next we have some more important leg information!

Legs are so easy to forget about after you've run through your mental checklist for your whole upper body but they are soooo important! Legs have the power to really make or break an image. So clearly relaxed and shoulder-width apart legs aren't quite the look we're going for here, let's get to fixing!

Even something as simple as putting her legs together makes a huge difference in Lisa's pose.

And here it is again "point your toes!"

Followed by our second classic "off-set your feet!"

And last but not least "chest to the ceiling!" I also had Lisa put her arms further back to lengthen them and make it easier for her to arch her back. Oh yeah, where'd those heels go?

Boom, pose perfection!

Next up we have a seemingly simple pose. Even though most of the "bad" versions of this pose still look amazing on our gorgeous model, there are a couple tweaks we can make to have this pose look even better.

Lisa's only instructions for this pose were "go to the middle of the bed and sit on your knees". Although there's something elegant about the simplicity of this pose, this is a boudoir shoot- let's get some curves up in here!

Oh look! We found a booty!

And of course we had to get that chest up and popping. Looking good, let's see if we can create some more curvy lines by getting Lisa to sit up a little.

It would appear we lost the booty again.

Found it! Having Lisa grab her robe doubles as posing her hands and being able to better show off the booty! We also had Lisa bring her feet together and I told her to "look down at your shoulder". Although she is clearly rocking those lashes, it looks like Lisa's neck and jaw line have disappeared.

Having Lisa bring her head forward like this or even look out the window allows us to see more of her neck and it defines her jaw line much more clearly, beautiful!!

Alright, I think you're starting to get the hang of this posing thing, aren't you?

Let's find out!

QUICK!!

Tell me how you would improve Lisa's pose here:

If we do the good ole head-to-toe check over, we'll see that Lisa's upper body is freaking flawless; sex goddess face on point. But wow, those legs are distracting.

What are the three things I probably told Lisa to get this result?:

Ou sorry, time's up!

Let's see if you got it ;)

Here's the answers we were looking for:

1. Feet together

2. Off-set your feet

3. Point your toes

Got it?

Perfect!!

Alright let's try another one!

Doesn't she look comfy? You know we can't have that! What should we fix?

How about chest and chin?

Whoa, hello curves and gorgeous long neck! This fantastic pose was brought to you by our sponsors "chest to the ceiling" and "chin up".

Now here is the main reason your back will be sore for a week after your shoot!

Alright Lisa where you hiding that booty now?

There it is!! Feet together, slightly off-set, toes pointed and booty to ceiling in combination with moving that robe out of the way makes for quite the difference in this pose!

Alright we've made it to our final destination, last posing fix!

Another prompt you'll hear me say during your session is "gently rest your fingers on your neck" and a lot of times I get something similar to this:

While it doesn't look bad, it's definitely not what we're aiming for; Lisa's hand covers her neck and we want to be able to see it! Let's try moving her hand over a little.

Having her fingers rest more on the side of her cheek gives us those gorgeous lines back in Lisa's jaw line and neck.

Even better, let's move her arm to the other side of her face so we're not blocking any neck lines! Now all of the lines and curves in this image draw us directly to Lisa's beautiful eyes, exactly what we wanted!

Hopefully you've learned at least one thing here today. Even if it's just that you're better at posing than you thought! I also hope I've given some women that extra little confidence boost they needed to book a session; what better way to test posing skills?! ;)

Feel free to visit my website if you'd like to check out some more of my work, or put your goddess poses to work and book a session: https://www.dndark.com/

Officially that's it for the posing blog!

Unofficially, I need to share some of the other images Lisa and I took at the end of her session because you guys need to understand the struggle I had trying to take a "bad" picture of this gorgeous woman.

Before we officially and unofficially end this blog post, a HUUUGE thank you goes out to my beautiful model, Lisa McDougall! Thank you for putting yourself out there and showing us what self-confidence is all about. Thank you for being so easy-going and 100% trusting in my vision. Most of all, thank you for the all the laughs and fun we had during this session! You were absolutely fantastic to work with and definitely made me want to take on more projects like this in the future!

If anyone has any other posing questions we didn't answer, ask us in the comments!

If we find out we're missing a lot, I guess we'll have to make a posing blog 2.0 ;)

Also, if you guys think that Lisa did a particularly amazing job modeling for us, let her know by tagging her in your comment. I'm sure she'd be open for questions as well if anyone is super curious about the boudoir model experience. You can check out her testimonial here: https://www.dndark.com/testimonials.

Thanks for reading lovelies!!