Years ago, I was watching America’s Next Top Model with my girlfriend at the time. Tyra was rejecting women on camera for being too short, too tall, too thin, too curvy, too whatever-it-was-that-day. And it kept hitting me that the women she was sending home looked a lot like the women I was already photographing in my studio.
Most of my clients then weren’t 5’10” and a size 2. They were 5’4″ and a size 10 or 12 or 14 and they walked through the door anyway. They sat in the makeup chair anyway. They got photographed anyway. And the pictures were good — not in spite of who they were, but because of it.
I built my career around that. Twenty-five years of photographing women the industry largely told to stay home.
Boudoir is the work that’s stayed interesting to me longer than anything else I’ve done.
There’s a moment in almost every session where the woman in front of the camera shifts. She arrives one version of herself — tentative, performing a little, hyperaware of every angle. A couple hours in, something settles. She stops checking. She starts being there. And the pictures that come out of that second half look nothing like the pictures from the first.
That’s the moment I’m chasing. Not the perfect shot. The moment she stops performing and starts existing in front of the camera.
Twenty-five years in, that’s still what makes the job worth doing.
How I work
Bring around ten outfits. We’ll use four or five of them in the session, but having more gives us options once we see what’s working in the light that day. I’ll explain that whole process during the consultation — the reason for the extras isn’t random.
I’ll show you images on the back of the camera a few shots in, so you can see what we’re making rather than wondering. When I tell you something looks great, I mean it. I’m not handing out compliments to keep the energy up — if it’s working, I’ll tell you. If we need to adjust, I’ll tell you that too.
Most women come in carrying some version of doubt. By an hour in, the doubt fades. By two hours in, it’s not in the room anymore. The session does that on its own. I don’t have to talk you into it.
On going further
Most women have never done a boudoir session before, so they don’t know what to expect when it comes to how much they’ll wear or not wear. Here’s how I handle it.
You decide what you’re comfortable with. That decision gets made well before the camera comes out — during the consultation, and again when you arrive at the studio. We talk through it plainly. There’s no surprise, no pressure, no nudging.
Sometimes, during a session, I’ll be working a particular pose or lighting setup and I can see the image would be stronger with less on — same composition, same idea, just topless or implied nude. When that happens, I’ll say so. It’s a suggestion based on what would make the photograph better, not a question I’m waiting on. You say yes or no, and either way the session keeps moving.
Some women come in already knowing they want to go that direction. Some come in wanting to stay fully covered. Some change their minds during the session, in either direction. All of that is normal. None of it changes anything about how the session runs.
What I bring
Patience, mostly.
Twenty-five years of doing this means I’m not nervous when you are. I’m not in a hurry. I’m not figuring it out as I go. The studio is set up. The lighting is dialed in. The hair and makeup team has done this hundreds of times. The session has a rhythm to it that I’ll guide us through.
What that means for you is simple: you don’t have to know what you’re doing. You don’t have to bring confidence with you. You don’t have to be ready.
Don’t worry about it. You’re in good hands. You’ll be fine. I’ve got everything under control.
The longer story
A lot of my early career was photographing just about anything you can think of — babies, school yearbooks, maternity sessions, dance and martial arts, band competitions. Then later on I added photographing bodybuilders, fitness competitors, and figure athletes. That work taught me lighting, taught me anatomy, taught me how to shoot a body so it reads the way the person inside it wanted it to read. It was good preparation for what came next.
Alongside all of that, I spent years shooting adult and erotic content — including editorial nude work for publications in that space. It’s a piece of my history I don’t hide from, because it shaped how I see the human body in front of a camera. Twenty-five years across that range — kids, families, fitness, fashion, portraiture, boudoir, editorial nude, erotic — is part of why the boudoir work I do now lands the way it does. I’ve photographed women in nearly every state a woman can be photographed in. Almost nothing surprises me anymore.
When COVID hit in 2020, the photography business I’d built up over twenty years went quiet almost overnight. Sessions canceled. The studio sat empty. For about five years, I worked warehouse jobs to keep things going. I got my CDL in July of 2025 and started driving over-the-road shortly after.
The photography never went anywhere. It just got quieter for a long time.
I’m building it back now, slowly and on my own terms. The brand is different from what it was before. The work is sharper. The clients I want to work with are women who care more about the experience than the spectacle. And the time I spend in the studio means more to me than it used to, because I know what it’s like to not have it.
If any of this sounded like the photographer you’d want to work with, the next step is a short conversation. Not a sales call. Just a chance to talk through what you’re thinking and see if this is the right fit.