Trust Me, Put This Fucking Thing On

This is a particular sentence I have probably said to more women than I can even remember.

“Trust me. Put this fucking thing on.”

Usually it comes immediately after she has looked at something I picked for her like I have momentarily lost my mind.

That won’t fit me.

I can’t wear that.

My stomach...

My boobs...

Absolutely not.

And occasionally, sure, there is no sophisticated explanation happening inside my head. It really is just some mysterious little internal mechanism screaming, put the damn bodysuit on.

One client was absolutely convinced she could not fit into something I had chosen for her. She came back out wearing it and the first thing she said was, “This is the best thing I’ve ever put on my body.”

It was stunning on her. Like somebody had secretly taken her measurements and made the thing specifically for that moment.

I fucking love when that happens.

I have always been pretty good at dressing women. I notice proportions, personality, coloring, the way something falls, what needs a little sprucing up, and the weird combinations that should not necessarily work but somehow do.

Some of it comes from experience.

Some of it is taste.

Some of it I honestly cannot explain.

And the older I get, the more I think that last part matters.

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Photography is full of things you can learn. Camera settings. Lighting patterns. Equipment. Editing. Rules upon rules about how to technically make a photograph.

Funny confession from someone who has been doing this professionally for years: that is actually the part that can still make me feel like a fraud.

I never finished my college photography courses. I am terrible at remembering technical terminology. Ask me to explain certain things in textbook photographer language and there is a decent chance my brain will politely exit the building.

It is one reason I have never particularly wanted to mentor photographers.

But put a woman in front of me and something entirely different happens.

I can see it.

I think there is some hidden mechanism in my brain where everything I have learned gets tangled together with experience, taste, instinct, music videos, movies, decades of obsessing over beautiful imagery, and whatever raw creative ability I happened to be born carrying.

Then I wing it.

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Which sounds terribly unprofessional until you consider that winging it well might actually be its own skill.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when strong imagery was fucking everywhere. MTV was actually playing music videos. Album artwork mattered. Movies had distinct visual identities. Fashion could be ridiculous and brilliant five minutes apart.

I watched music videos constantly. Still do...

I think all those years of imagery quietly built an archive somewhere in my head. Not an instruction manual. More like millions of little visual fragments waiting to introduce themselves to one another.

Maybe that is why photography has never felt two dimensional to me.

When I am shooting, I am seeing the scene in real time. If I get the photograph I wanted, I do not necessarily move on. I move myself.

What happens if I come closer?

What happens from here?

What if the light changes?

What does this look like when the room disappears and all I can see is her expression?

One moment can have several completely different photographs hiding inside it.

You just have to notice them before they disappear.

That same instinct determines when I direct and when I shut up.

I do a lot of loose, flowing poses because I want things to look natural, just glammed up a little. I might guide an arm, shift a hip, change the light, move her somewhere entirely different, or let the movement keep going because I can see something forming that I do not want to interrupt.

There is a little bit of directing involved.

There is also a little bit of hunting.

You are waiting for the moment inside the movement.

Clients cannot see any of this, of course. They are trapped on the other side of the photograph. They know the position feels weird. They know their stomach exists. They know they have a bruise on their thigh, a breakout on their face, or absolutely no fucking clue what “sexy” is supposed to feel like.

Meanwhile, I am ten feet away thinking, if you could only see what I can see.

Sometimes I genuinely want to grab them by the shoulders and shake a little sense into them. Not because their insecurity is silly. Because it is convincing them that their perspective is the only one available.

That is why I show the back of my camera throughout a session.

That first real look is one of my favorite parts... There is almost always this tiny moment of shock. Wait. That’s me?

Yep.

That weird pose you were worried about?

Yep.

That thing you swore you could not wear?

Also yep.

It is magic, but not because suddenly all of their insecurities disappear. It is magic because, for a second, they are allowed to borrow my eyes. And once that happens, trust changes the entire session. They loosen up. They get curious. And then the real fun begins.

It made me wonder recently how much of being a photographer actually happens before the shutter is ever pressed. Take the camera completely out of a boudoir session and the whole thing becomes kind of fascinating...

A woman walks into a room and allows someone she may barely know to choose clothes she might never choose, move her body into positions that may feel completely unnatural, ask her to soften here, arch there, look this way, close her eyes, trust the light, trust the angle, trust that the thing currently making her feel vulnerable is going to become something beautiful.

Without the camera, it almost sounds like some strange private encounter with a lover you do not fully know yet.

Nervous. Vulnerable. Curious.

A little turned on by the moment, and I do not mean sexually.

I mean activated. Captivated by what might happen next.

There is something quietly transformative in simply allowing yourself to experience that.

And maybe that is the invisible part of this work.

The camera records what is in front of it.

The art is noticing what could be there.

Technical skill matters. Experience matters. Taste matters. God knows good lighting matters. But there is another piece that is harder to put on a résumé...

Reading the room. Reading the woman.

Thinking three moves ahead while remaining willing to throw the whole plan away because something better just appeared...

Seeing dimension where somebody else sees an awkward pose. Seeing the perfect outfit before the person wearing it believes you. Seeing the photograph before it exists.

I cannot tell you exactly where that comes from.

Maybe that is why I still find it interesting after all these years. Somewhere between everything I have intentionally learned and everything I accidentally absorbed, something learned how to see. And every once in a while, all that mysterious creative mind mapping can be reduced to one highly sophisticated artistic instruction:

Trust me.

Put this fucking thing on.