January 30, 2009 07:42 PM
Our client, Candice White, a brilliant portrait photographer, is expanding her business to include boudoir photography. After receiving over 100,000 hits on her portraiture website, we discovered that her boudoir pages were receiving more hits than any other category. Since her main business is family and child portraiture, we thought this was information worth acting on.




Turns out that even after factoring out undesirable traffic, the number of hits on her boudoir photography page was substantial. We began by discussing a theme for the site. Ms. White has a strong love of theatricality in her photography, so we decided to use a theater-look as a springboard for designing the site.

What does a theater have? Curtains. Great big, sensual, velvety curtains. What didn’t we have at our disposal? You got it. But the next best thing was using lots of imagination and a bit of Photoshop to create our own curtains.

Fortunately, Candice happened to have a red dress made of a very “red curtainy” material. We steamed it a bit to remove some wrinkles and hung it on a garment rack as you can see below. We locked down the camera and shot several frames in succession, each time moving the dress down a bit and rotating it so that the folds fell differently for each shot. This gave us a natural-looking lighting setup — slightly hot on one side and falling off to the right.








It took some manipulation in Photoshop to get the “curtain” to be reasonably even at the bottom from stage right to stage left. Once completed, we copied the curtain’s several layers into a new single layer and made a layer mask out of its shape, then unlinked the mask. We used Motion Blur to get rid of all the wrinkles, once and for all, and blended the new, blurred curtain with the curtain layers below using Overlay. This gave a sheen and a snap to the curtain that the original lacked.

Touching up a few minor flaws, we then had our curtain. We added a valance and a stage and we were in “show bidness!”