“Say Cheese!”
I am not a fan of “model face”. You know the one. Ben Stiller parodied it in Zoolander, above.
A lot of time when I am taking pictures, people feel like they have to make this face for the camera. They can’t smile, because smiling is the realm of school pictures. This is “serious art” and therefore, you must be serious to do it.
And I say no, I want to see you smile and laugh and dance and sing.
But that’s not it, either.
If you are merely smiling because that’s what is “expected”, we have captured nothing, because you have experienced nothing.
When I say I want to see you smile, I don’t mean that I want to see the muscles on your face move to create an upward curve of the lips. I don’t want to see you merely smile. This is the realm of school photos and Walmart portraits, where we paste on a face to satisfy a minimum level of imagemaking. Show some teeth! Say Cheese! Say Prunes! (Seriously; that’s what they used to say to get people looking serious…)
Instead, what I want to do is capture a moment of you experiencing joy, and expressing that with your face. With your eyes. Your whole being. The smile is not the important thing here, it is merely a manifestation of the emotions that show that you are having fun. And that fun, that joy, is what is important. How do you experience joy? How do you display the fact that something was funny or fun or enjoyable? I don’t want to see a pasted smile; I want to see the real thing.
And I don’t want to see you throw your shoulders back and lift your chin up and pretend to feel confident in yourself. I want you to feel confident in yourself, and because of that, your chin goes up, your eyes flash.
The Beyond Boudoir Experience is just that: an experience. And I want you to experience it. I want you to experience joy, confidence, pleasure, contentedness. I want you to laugh because something was funny, I want you to dance because you are full of joy. This is not about imposing something from the outside, but revealing something about what is within you. About revealing personality, character, motion emotion as much as about your body.
If you are interested in the experience, I invite you to fill out our no-commitment consultation form.