One of the biggest questions that come in from boudoir clients is “Are my photos private?”
The short and simple answer: YES. Your photos are always kept private. The nature of boudoir photography is to capture intimate and sensual images, and usually these are the types of images that often we wouldn’t want anyone other than our partner to see. Because of that, I do keep all of your photos private.
What exactly does that mean, though? I know that every photographer is different when it comes to their privacy agreements. Some photographers may keep all of your photos private, no matter what. Some photographers may have special clauses in place that give you the option of what you want to do with your photos. Aside from never doing online proofing for these sessions for privacy sake, I have several options that are presented to our clients regarding the privacy & use of their images. I’ll briefly go over some of these typical situations.
Completely Private Photos
This is exactly how it sounds. Your photos are always kept private by me. You have your photo session, view your images, order your products, and then I store your images for 8-12 months so that I can access them in the event something happens where you need to reorder products down the road. After approximately 8-12 months your photos are deleted as I need to free up storage space.
Photos for Internal Portfolio Use
I do like to keep studio album samples as well as pose samples to show potential clients. These are to show off images as well as the products.
General Body or Anonymous Photos
This is usually a great option if you want to help me by sharing your images on my website or other business sites or printed materials, but don’t want everyone to know who you are. Unidentifiable photos are usually detail shots that do not include your face. If you have tattoos, scars, or other identifying marks, I can usually remove these from the photos that you’d like to share if that is a concern for you.
Open Sharing – Web and Print sources
Share them with the world! If you don’t mind it, you can allow me to share your images online or in print (marketing materials, offline portfolio, business cards, etc).
Professional Image Competition
Occasionally I enter images into a professional image competition. This is actually a fairly private display where the technical and emotional aspects of the image are judged by other professional photographers.
Sharing your images is never a requirement, and every client fills out a model release form specifying what they would like done with their images. I am very grateful for those that do let me share images in all the categories and it’s great for potential clients that want to see sample images before booking a session.
Please feel free to discuss these options with me at your session to ensure we both understand what you’re looking for.