How To Shoot Boudoir Pho­tog­ra­phy A to Z

I had the honor & priv­i­lege of being inter­viewed by “The Image Doc­tors” for their pod­cast.  We talked in great detail about how to pre­pare to shoot boudoir pho­tog­ra­phy from start to fin­ish.  From the ini­tial phone call from the client to the final out­put of images, and every­thing in between.  Jason and Rick are true pros and know the busi­ness of pho­tog­ra­phy.  I hope you enjoy the pod­cast.  As you know if any of you have any ques­tions please email us and we will try to answer them as best we can.  Click the link below to listen!

Boudoir Inter­view with “The Image Doctors”

Image Doc­tors:  Hey every­one & wel­come to the Image Doc­tors.  This is episode 110 for Feb 4^th, 2010.  I am Jason Odell and I am Rick Walker & today’s pod­cast we are going to devote the entire time to really fun inter­view with really fun guy.  We thor­oughly enjoyed this inter­view.   It’s with Tony Man­darich & prob­a­bly there will be some of you that instantly rec­og­nize that name and some of you are say­ing I’ve heard that name but I don’t know why.  So why don’t we, with­out fur­ther ado, go ahead & jump in to the inter­view.  But, one of the things we are going to be talk­ing about in the inter­view, in addi­tion to the inter­est­ing career that Tony  had prior to becom­ing a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, we will talk a lit­tle bit about Boudoir pho­tog­ra­phy, work­ing with mod­els, and things like that which is some­thing we really have never done on this pod­cast. And it‘s per­fect for com­ing up on Valen­tines .. there’s a bunch of things com­ing up, so with­out any fur­ther hes­i­ta­tion, let’s get Tony on the phone.  Wel­come, Tony to the show, thanks for join­ing us on the Image Doctors

Tony:  Thanks for hav­ing me guys,

Image Doc­tors:    We really appre­ci­ate it.  Any time that we can get an inter­view with a pho­tog­ra­pher, take time out of your day, it’s always a plea­sure for us to meet new peo­ple, and expose our lis­ten­ing audi­ence to new sub­jects in pho­tog­ra­phy.        We wanted to start off a lit­tle today with the way you got into pho­tog­ra­phy, because unlike most of us you prob­a­bly didn’t start off think­ing I’m going to be a pho­tog­ra­pher, your posi­tion is a lit­tle different.

Tony: no. no, yah, when I was 11 I was like, you know what, I want to play in the NFL, I want to be a pro­fes­sional foot­ball player and it wasn’t a pho­tog­ra­pher but as time and I grew up and you  find out and you have life expe­ri­ences, do things  that shape you, things that you lean toward, but  pho­tog­ra­phy was always one of those things but the ques­tion for me was like how did they do that shot, whether it was a land­scape  or whether it was a pic­ture of a per­son, and I always thought what  was curi­ous for me was how did they make that shot look like that … so you have to kind of reverse engi­neer it right?  either find the per­son or ask the pro­fes­sion­als and then they reverse engi­neer it there and they say so this is where the light is com­ing from, and prob­a­bly it was shot at this time of day and there is so much too it with  com­po­si­tion, angle, where you are com­ing from, you know, and I mean as you guys know you can shoot some­thing at high noon and make it look like it’s night.  You know!

Image Doc­tors:  yah, so for our lis­ten­ers who are not aware Tony wanted to be an NFL foot­ball player because he’s prob­a­bly the one guy I know who is big enough to be an NFL foot­ball player..(laughter) so what  are you 6’7’, huh, Tony?

Tony:  oh 6’5’, oh and you know, a skinny 305

Image Doc­tors:  exactly, and mean.   As we were talk­ing before hand, I saw your name on Face­Book and it imme­di­ately rang a bell with me because that name seems really famil­iar because in the 1980’s when I was in high school, at the time, and in the late 80’s I had a sub­scrip­tion to Sports Illus­trated… and there is a very famous photo of you on the cover of Sports Illus­trated because you were actu­ally play­ing in the NFL for a few years, is that correct?

Tony:  Yah, I ended up being drafted in 1989 by Green Bay and spent four years there was there until ‘92, was out of the league for three years and then came back to play in ‘96 at Indi­anapo­lis and played there until the last sea­son I played was ‘98 and I retired in ‘99. So I was lucky enough to play my last year in Green Bay with Bret Favre and then my last two sea­sons at Indi­anapo­lis with Pey­ton Man­ning and a bunch of those other guys Mar­vin Har­ri­son and  Edger­ton James   some of those guys will be hall of famers; it was great really a dream come true for me.  Because, you know, like I said at age 11 I had made a deci­sion, you know what?  I want to play in the NFL, that was what I wanted to do, and obvi­ously with a lot of work and a lot of prepa­ra­tion and a lot of  luck and not being hurt and just tak­ing the right avenue, I was lucky enough to get drafted and really live that dream out.  It had its ups and downs , if any­body  knows the his­tory of my career, it  had some pretty low lows but it had some pretty high highs, and it ended on a really high note and so now I can’t believe I’ve been retired for 11 years, it just makes me feel old.

Image Doc­tors:  (laugh­ter)  We know that feel­ing , by the way.  And you put out a book last year, correct?

Tony: Yah, it came out last March, March of 09 and it‘s called “My Dirty Lit­tle Secrets   Steroids, Alco­hol and God”  and it’s really, just  a really pretty can­did, hon­est  rec­ol­lec­tion of what hap­pened behind the scenes , a lot of this stuff the fans did not know about, really tak­ing own­er­ship of my faults and the things that I did wrong and really a cau­tion­ary tale for any ath­lete, high school foot­ball player, really any ath­lete, any kid that is con­tem­plat­ing  on using steroids or drugs in gen­eral, because a big part of my prob­lem was painkillers,  pre­scrip­tion pain killers which you kind of feel like, well it’s not a street drug, it’s not cocaine, it’s not an ille­gal drug and you kind of ratio­nal­ize it and you have to be really care­ful that you don’t get hooked to start using it.

Image Doc­tors: Yah, I recall Brett Favre had a sim­i­lar issue

Tony:  Yah, he did and I think he had that issue three years after I was already with Indi­anapo­lis so you know I could totally relate to what he was going through.

Image Doc­tors: Yah, and it’s not unique to pro­fes­sional ath­letes either, it’s a much broader thing.   I’m curi­ous, you know going from a career like you had in foot­ball into pho­tog­ra­phy, that’s a very big change.  Now you men­tioned  inter­ests at an early point, so that was prob­a­bly some­thing that was always out there, but  what made you decide to move into pho­tog­ra­phy as a profession?

Tony:  Well, you know it’s prob­a­bly one of my biggest pas­sions, and you  know I had a 35 MM DSLR  but hav­ing one and know­ing how to use one are two dif­fer­ent things.   In Green Bay I had one, you know I took shots and would be like, I don’t get it, why is this too dark or why is this too light or why is this not look­ing the way I want it to look?  In the olden days like then when you had to use film it was a whole dif­fer­ent process.  I did not have a dark­room, I took it to a place to be devel­oped.  And at that time I was so busy with foot­ball that it kind of took a sec­ond seat and when I got to Indy in 1995 or 6 and Sony came out with a cam­era called the Sony Mav­er­icka .  It was a dig­i­tal cam­era and it recorded on a 3 ½” floppy disc.

Image Doc­tors:  Yah I had a friend that had one.

Tony: You put the floppy disc in the cam­era, you talk about sim­ple, you take the shot, you take the floppy, just put it in your com­puter and it’s there.  It sounds like this is pretty cool, and so I started get­ting much more seri­ous about it at that point when the dig­i­tal was in the infancy of dig­i­tal, and it fas­ci­nated me, and then some of the post pro­duc­tion stuff that you could do, at that point, I was like it was kind of cool!  Except if I were to look back at that stuff now it’s like I thought, you know over –sat­u­rated some­thing by plus 50 …

Image Doc­tors:  I think we all went through that stage

Tony:  Thank God that there was not like online port­fo­lios that you put your stuff on, and say “hey, look what I can do!”   (chuck­les)  But you know you go through that and it is part of the learn­ing process  I think because it lets you know  hey this over does it, or this under does it with this desat­u­rates   or your con­trast or your curves or what­ever you are deal­ing with the lev­els in Pho­to­shop or what­ever edit­ing you’re using for post pro­duc­tion.  And you know I started, at that time I dated a girl in Indi­anapo­lis that did local mod­el­ing, and I would go with her to some of these photo shoots by these pho­tog­ra­phers.  These pho­tog­ra­phers were shoot­ing for their own port­fo­lios and they would have lights and every­thing  and cam­eras, nice cam­eras, and in between shots or when they were done with a set  I would just have my girl­friend hold up for 5 min­utes and I would just take some shots with my  point & shoot or my Mav­er­icka, just to take some shots for fun so we would have the shots.  Well, when she would get her shots back from the pho­tog­ra­pher, and I would com­pare them against my shots, the pho­tog­ra­phers shots were def­i­nitely bet­ter than mine, but they were not that much bet­ter!  So we kind of looked at it and you know, I was not that far off; well I watched him do it because I was there, and I watched the way he moved the lights, and where he put things and his com­po­si­tion and what he was using and about the only thing I didn’t know because I didn’t want to bother the pho­tog­ra­pher was what aper­ture he was shoot­ing at and all that other stuff, so that is really how it started to evolve and then as years went by the dig­i­tal got bet­ter and bet­ter and now out of this world sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter and things you can do obvi­ously things you can do with dig­i­tal that you never could do with film you know adjust­ing your color tem­per­a­ture, there are purists that will say you could adjust how you wanted the color tem­per­a­ture to look by doing cer­tain things or by buy­ing cer­tain film, but you know you couldn’t just go to color tem­per­a­ture and  take it to 6700 kelvin (?) or to 4000 kelvin depend­ing on what’s going on and just shoot it.  I mean the flex­i­bil­ity is just absolutely unbe­liev­able.  So that piqued my inter­est and got me going, and then I got tired of shoot­ing that girl, so I got rid of her, (laugh­ter) and then, whether you guys want to cut that out it’s up to you two!

Image Doc­tors:  I think we’ll leave it in for a bit of color.  I like it.  I had a friend who once told me that when I said where is your girl­friend … he said oh, I fired her!

Tony:  So, then what hap­pened, was, you know you are so in that phase of , hey look, I would love to shoot Vic­to­ria secret mod­els, and I would love to shoot Play­boy style,  or I would love to shoot that beau­ti­ful Boudoir style,.  And you know there is a HUGE dif­fer­ence between shoot­ing that raunchy and sleazy or shoot­ing that classy and beau­ti­ful mak­ing the woman look absolutely stun­ning.  But, there was so lit­tle knowl­edge in how to do it that I was really over­whelmed on it, so you don’t even do it, because how are you going to do this because are you going to look like a fool.  I always had that con­cern that am I going to look stu­pid in front of this girl, you know I don’t know how to direct her to pose, or how to light, so I knew that I had a huge learn­ing curve to do this before I got  started really get­ting seri­ous about it.  So then what I kind of veered towards was land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, because the trees can’t talk back to you.

Image Doc­tors:  Right, they are not going to say you are an idiot.

Tony:  The moun­tains and rivers and lakes aint going to talk back.  But you learn a lot with that too, and it was very impor­tant and I love land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy and you know, my wife and I now, she is a spe­cial pho­tog­ra­pher and she’s been shoot­ing for close to 20 years now, and just to give you a brief his­tory on her, she shot mostly wed­dings and seniors until I came into the pic­ture and I said “You know shoot­ing wed­dings and seniors is great, but I’m not shoot­ing wed­dings and seniors, I’ll shoot mod­els, or adver­tis­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, or com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy or  lifestyle pho­tog­ra­phy.  So that kind of steered her away from that because I think she saw that it was more inter­est­ing.  I think there is a cer­tain bit of insan­ity with wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy, because you have to deal with the bride, the bride’s mom, and it’s a pretty impor­tant day so, there’s pros and cons to every­thing , and I tip my hat off to wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phers because the stuff they have to deal with is unbe­liev­able..  you know not only do they have to shoot , but you have to shoot it the way they want it and some­times your vision of what they say is dif­fer­ent than their vision of what they say.  So we’ve done a few wed­dings, but they’ve been actu­ally pretty inter­est­ing because  they’ve been wed­dings of clients how have already been our clients say for com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy and then  they say, “Hey can you shoot our wed­ding…”  and one wed­ding was, I don’t want to say it was a biker wed­ding, but it was a cus­tom bike builder who got mar­ried, so even his wed­ding was fairly unique because the peo­ple there were just awe­some, the char­ac­ters and a bunch of short mini skirts, it was just per­fect!  And I was like if there was ever a wed­ding I want to shoot, this is it.

Image Doc­tors:  By the way, we’ll just men­tion that we’ve looked at a lot of the images in your gal­leries and Jason has one of them up right now so if we hap­pen to drift off and we aren’t talk­ing you will know that we are look­ing closely.

Tony:   Are we doing an interview?

Image Doc­tors:  I’ve got to say that you’ve learned it, the light­ing, the poses, every­thing is just fantastic.

Tony:  Thank you, I appre­ci­ate that, and you know it did not hap­pen over night.  It took a lot of work and you know a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion, and my wife and I, we pretty much work as a team.  There are def­i­nitely strengths that she has in pho­tog­ra­phy that are way stronger than mine, one of them being how to pose a girl, and I think that when she was younger she mod­eled, and then her being on both sides of the cam­era has helped, and I’ve learned from talk­ing with her  about that,  the basic light­ing, I learned from her, that light­ing was for good expo­sure and that was it because that was all she needed to know for wed­ding and por­traits.  What hap­pened when we moved to Phoenix 6 years ago, I assisted a pho­tog­ra­pher for a whole year, a guy named Paul Marco, he’s one of the nation­ally known com­mer­cial, and adver­tis­ing  pho­tog­ra­pher, he’s fan­tas­tic guy.  And do you know what?  He had no secrets to hide.  It was like he saw how pas­sion­ate I was about it, and he said this is how I do it and this is how this works…  he wasn’t threat­ened by “oh my gosh, this guy is going to take clients away from me or any­thing like that.”  He said, you know what, you can have the best cam­era, and have the best light­ing equip­ment and you can have the best look­ing model, but the bot­tom line is you still have to shoot it, you still have to direct it and you still have to eye it, and your eye is dif­fer­ent than my eye, and what comes out of your head is going to be so dif­fer­ent than what comes out of my head.  The def­i­n­i­tion of beau­ti­ful to you is prob­a­bly dif­fer­ent than the def­i­n­i­tion of beau­ti­ful to me.  The same with my wife, my wife shoots  the same girl that I shoot in the same light­ing, and her def­i­n­i­tion of beau­ti­ful and sexy is way dif­fer­ent than my def­i­n­i­tion of beau­ti­ful and sexy, and my def­i­n­i­tion has a lot more edge to it,  where hers has a lot more soft­ness and beauty to it.  So it’s great for the client because they get the best of both worlds.  And it is inter­est­ing when the client at the end of the day or the fol­low­ing week when they pick the cer­tain images that need to get edited  inter­est­ing because they usu­ally lean toward one of the styles, it could either be hers or some­times it’s mine.  Let’s say they pick 10 pic­tures they want done and 10 are hers and 2 are mine or vice versa because they just like a cer­tain style, and they have no idea which one of us shot what.  And that is kind of the trend that we’ve noticed, and it’s good for the client because it gives them the best of both worlds in that aspect.

Image Doc­tors:  I have to believe that with the num­ber of shoots you’ve done by this point you prob­a­bly have kind of a gen­er­al­ized process that you use men­tally just to guide your­selves both in terms of how you start work­ing with the model, how you talk with them, inter­act with them, get them com­fort­able, and then how you get the shot set up and how you decide on your light­ing.  Could you give us some insight into that whole process?

Tony:  Yes, absolutely, and you know, I’ll just give you the process from this last week.  A girl calls us, and says she wants pho­tographs for her hus­band for Valentine’s Day.  She’s seen our web­site and she’s gone through it and yah da yah da so okay, take pic­tures off of our web­site, right click them and save them in a folder.  Surf the inter­net, I don’t know where you surf, whether you surf Vic­to­ria Secret or what­ever kind of style or image you like.  Surf the Inter­net, grab the pic­tures that you like, that you want to emu­late.  And we told them, you don’t need to know why you like them, just let us know that you like them and that’s what you want, because what it does for us is, again, we’ll start reverse engi­neer­ing, look at the com­po­si­tion and how the pose is, where the light is com­ing from, what style they like, and that really helps us a ton, when you get back to that point of the girl wants sexy shots for her hus­band.  Well my def­i­n­i­tion of sexy is prob­a­bly dif­fer­ent from her def­i­n­i­tion of sexy.  So that’s why we say “show me” what you think is sexy, and that helps us plan for the shoot.  One of the biggest things a girl, I’d say maybe 30% of our girls that we shoot will go, kind of be, not really be argu­men­ta­tive about it, but will say “I don’t need a makeup artist and I don’t need a hair­styl­ist.”   Then we say “If you want this to look awe­some, hire the artist, we’ve got the makeup artist and the hair­styl­ist, we’ve got sev­eral of them that we use, and there are one or two that are our favorites.”  And we tell them “it makes a dif­fer­ence” and out of those 20 or 30% that opt not to pay that extra $250 or $400 depend­ing on how long we shoot them for the makeup artists, at the end almost 100% of them regret it, because they say well why doesn’t it look as good.  Well it’s because there wasn’t a makeup artist there and we do our best, because there’s two of us shoot­ing .  We do our best to make sure, you know, that if a col­lar is flipped out and it shouldn’t be flipped out, that we cor­rect that dur­ing the shoot.  But when we are con­cen­trat­ing on the pho­tog­ra­phy part, the makeup artist almost dou­bles as a wardrobe per­son so she will go, look at some­thing and say but that doesn’t look just right, let me fix her hair, let me do this.  Some­thing is stick­ing out of the back of her shirt and doesn’t look just right or what­ever, so the makeup artist is cru­cial, a hair­styl­ist, luck­ily we have a cou­ple of girls that do both.  So we always tell the girl that it is cru­cial that you get this if you want the best pos­si­ble image.  And then we get the images from them that they like, I’d say half the time we will meet with the girl before the shoot, it might be a week or two or three before the shoot, again just to go over the things, to go over our exist­ing web­site, and she’ll be yes I like this, no I don’t like this, this kind of style really does it for me.  And then we tell them, bring way more wardrobe than you think you’ll need, because we can sit there, then we have options to pick and choose.  Then we tell them, there is actu­ally a post we did a few days ago on our blog, on the Man­darich Mod­els Blog that kind of like a check list of do’s and don’ts in prepar­ing for one of our photo shoots.  The day of the shoot, shower in the morn­ing, don’t wear any makeup, don’t put any­thing in your hair, don’t wear any­thing tight, don’t wear a bra,  wear a loose sweat­shirt, loose sweats  so there are no lines embed­ded in your skin.  If you could do a pedi­cure and man­i­cure the day before, it helps, at the end of the day, those lit­tle details help.  You start talk­ing details like hair and makeup, get­ting your nails done cor­rectly, all these things accu­mu­la­tive add up into get­ting as good a shot as you can get.  One of the things we dis­cour­age is the self tan­ner stuff, because it is blotchy.  Reg­u­lar tan­ning is fine, whether the tan­ning booth or out­side, but don’t do the rub-on or the spray tan a cou­ple days or the day of the shoot because it looks blotchy.  You know lit­tle tricks like that we always encour­age our girls to bring an escort with them, to feel more com­fort­able, a friend that they can feel com­fort­able with.  We encour­age them NOT to bring their boyfriends or hus­bands, because all of a sud­den you have a sec­ond pho­tog­ra­pher telling them (laugh­ter.  Image Doc­tor:   Back seat pho­tog­ra­phy. .) and that was me, that was me years ago, but  I went for the secu­rity rea­son, for my old girl­friend, obvi­ously I didn’t hype in to say hey you should shoot it this way or this way because I didn’t know any­thing, and it wasn’t my place.   But some­times you’ll get, we will shoot a girl for her port­fo­lio and her boyfriend will come with her, and he starts direct­ing on this is what I think you should do, so I just stop and I give him a cam­era, and say “go ahead and shoot it” (lots of laugh­ter) and it kind of shuts them up pretty quick because they don’t even know where the shut­ter is, right?   And there is a whole check­list of things we con­tinue to go over, but that’s really the method­ol­ogy.  And then the day of the shoot  we just tell them to make sure they get enough sleep the night before, if you are really stressed it is going to show in the pic­tures, try to be relaxed, try to be your­self,  try to be at com­fort, and we tell the girls if there is a shot , or if you are plan­ning on doing any kind of classy moods or any­thing like that, if you are uncom­fort­able with a guy being there, let us know, because Char  can shoot it, my wife, she can shoot the main part of the female,  because I can set up all the lights, I do as much work as I can, so Char has the least amount of work to do after, then I just, you know, go check my email , or some­thing, and let them shoot it  girls that we shoot that are lin­gerie that feel uncom­fort­able with a guy being there shoot­ing, because they are  shoot­ing it for their hus­band, and that their hus­band might be uncom­fort­able know­ing that there was another guy there, so we get all that out in the open weeks before so we know and so she feels less threat­ened.  In our case, there is noth­ing to be threat­ened about but there are pho­tog­ra­phers out there in an ama­teur sta­tus that have raised that as a cause of con­cern with some of these mod­els, when you hear  some hor­ror sto­ries and things like that where the guy started hit­ting on the model , you know but that is poor.  If you want to do that go to match.com, right?  Use a dat­ing web­site, don’t use pho­tog­ra­phy.  So, we try to make the girl feel as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble, and I would say that 5 to 7% of the girls will feel that way and will say that they are more com­fort­able with just the girls being in the room and shoot­ing.  95% of them are totally fine, and you know if some­body would ask me that ques­tion I would say it would maybe be a 60–40 but 95% of them are fine and I think in our case, one of the rea­sons they are fine with it is that this is a process about pho­tog­ra­phy and they start to see how much work goes into it with prepa­ra­tion and set­ting up the lights, set­ting up the meet­ings before, giv­ing them lists of do’s and don’ts, do this don’t  do that to pre­pare for the shoot, and they start to see that we really are inter­ested in giv­ing them the best pos­si­ble images so the threat of this guy see­ing me in lin­gerie isn’t there, where it might be in other cases where the guy is meet­ing her in a hotel room and what­ever, you know?

Image Doc­tors:  Yah, how long does a nor­mal shoot take, start to fin­ish, from when they arrive to when they depart?

Tony:  Depend­ing on the pack­age, we have a lunch hour pack­age which is basi­cally one look, one back ground, no makeup artist, if you aren’t hir­ing one, which is half to one-third of your time, (girl being prepped—these are the four basic shots we will be doing; what makes the most sense for these shots?  Then the make-up artist has to do the work.) She has to do the most time effec­tive work; let’s say we do a por­trait, and she decides it makes sense to do that first, before she has to start going crazy with the more elab­o­rate stuff, lots of beauty work on her face, makeup and hair.  You don’t want to do the big makeup first and then the casual stuff where she has to scrape off all the makeup.  The lunch hour ses­sion will take about two hours because of setup; hour or hour and a half for the girl; one out­fit, she lays out the out­fit; we make sug­ges­tions and ask her what she would like; we talk.  We shoot it and that usu­ally gets about 200–300 pics that she can choose from.  Then if you go to our full day pack­age, which is an 8 hour shoot, 99% of them get a makeup artist who is here all day, shoot four or five series; if she’s fast, we’ll shoot  6–7-8 series if there isn’t any time constraint.

Image Doc­tors:  You were talk­ing a lit­tle bit about them feel­ing com­fort­able, and I have to believe there is a big psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect to all this, and how to make things come across well.  Is there any­thing you have found that work par­tic­u­larly well with your mod­els, that you do to get their com­fort level up?

Tony:  Yeah, the com­fort level and details and vari­ables mat­ter.  If you have a web­site or port­fo­lio on a mod­el­ing site, what you put in that port­fo­lio, not just images that carry the most weight, make the pro­file non threat­en­ing.  Make it real; men­tion there is always another female there.  Encour­age her to bring another female or escort with her (boyfriend, hus­band, dad or best friend); that lets her know that she can be less threat­ened.  She is encour­aged to bring secu­rity.  So how you write your copy on your site mat­ters.  Meet­ing with her before the shoot, start­ing to build rela­tion­ship, let­ting her know that you want the best images, our main motive.  You want her to say, “Man!  I can’t believe this is me.  It looks so great!”  I look for vibes of feel­ing threat­ened.  As soon as you meet with her, 15 min­utes or an hour, they real­ize this is busi­ness; what we are try­ing to do is get the best pos­si­ble prod­uct for what they want.  We work to elim­i­nate the threat.  I think our approach puts them at ease.  For us it’s being real and say­ing, hey look, let’s try this and this and once they see this is about prepa­ra­tion and busi­ness, not me get­ting half-naked in front of this guy; they start to see that was my per­cep­tion that I was con­cerned about, but now they see there’s a lot more to this work.

Image Doc­tors:  Absolutely.  Theme I’m pick­ing up here, and it’s just excel­lent, and it applies all the way around, is that level of detail and pre­pared­ness that you bring to the table here, whether it’s a wed­ding or some­thing else, they are a lit­tle bit hes­i­tant to ..  they see the price for the pack­age, and think ..  my hus­band has a cam­era or my best friend has a cam­era.. how hard can that be?  And they’ll give me a CD for free.  There’s no prep or work in that; even if you have the lights, there’s no work in that.  You guys have a stu­dio envi­ron­ment, right?

Tony:  It depends on what the style of shoot is.  60% of the shoots are done in our house, because of envi­ron­ment..  fur­ni­ture, walls, stuff on the walls, piano..  day to day things .. neat look­ing doors…  in a stu­dio, if a girl wants that Play­boy style or that lin­gerie style,  there’s a lot of setup.  Have to set up the atmos­phere.  We do a lot of that; most are either done at our house or their house.  They may have a beau­ti­ful home per­fect for shoot­ing.  Warm Col­ors and tones, depend­ing on the style of prod­uct they want.  If she is look­ing for a clean look, solid back­ground and col­ors, then we’re def­i­nitely in the stu­dio.  Send us the pics you like off the Inter­net, make a folder of 15–20 images…  if 17 of those pics have a solid color back­ground, then we need to be in the stu­dio.  If they have envi­ron­men­tal stuff (stair­case, bed w/satin sheets, win­dows) then we’re at our house or hers.  A lot of that depends on what they want.  We tell her pick the images that do it for you.  Pick the pics off the Inter­net that make you say, OMYGOSH I love this image.  You don’t have to ana­lyze it; we’ll do that; we just have to know what you like, not why you like it.

Image Doc­tors:  Jason keeps bring­ing up pages on your web­site and it keeps dis­tract­ing us..  (laugh­ter)..  Your light­ing is very nice.  Are there cer­tain types of light­ing you grav­i­tate to?  Light­ing modifiers?

Tony:  The first thing we look at is what images she likes  –bro­ken record here. It’s not what I like; it’s what she likes; I like warm tones, sexy, ..  we usu­ally have one main light..  my favorite shoot­ing is with one light.. get­ting that beau­ti­ful dra­matic look. But it depends on how you want the pic to feel; there are vari­ables involved; key light to get that catch in her eye to get most or half of her lit up, then we’ll do a rim light or hair light—45 degree angle of the oppo­site end of where the main light is; so if you have the sub­ject in front of you, then 45 degrees to left is main light shoot­ing at her; behind her is the other light shoot­ing at her back or side of her body, you can do a soft box to get more of the body or you can do a scoop to get more of the rim like on her hair, dif­fer­ent color gels to get dif­fer­ent themes and out­fits..  one of the girls is a 37 year old fit­ness model, mother of four, body is incred­i­ble; flew in from Bal­ti­more; we did photo shoot with her; she was absolutely out­stand­ing; her sec­ond photo shoot ever; very con­fi­dent; she knew she had a good body and was grounded which makes it so much eas­ier to work with her.  We got that main light, got the soft box with a hot pink gel ..  we do a series of 50–60 pics, takes the gel off and do more pics with­out the gel.. gives it a totally dif­fer­ent feel but you’ve made an adjust­ment in 2 sec­onds; make the light more spe­cific on top or back or her hair..  add scoop of the grid or beauty dish with the grid to make a more spe­cific spot; some­times we add warm­ing gel to make hair more gold; depends on out­fit, back­ground, add other ele­ments..  smoke machine/fog machine..  lit­tle big of fog in the back­ground,  blurry, adds to pic and mood of pic; a lot of girls love it; some don’t; love the feel of how dreamy it looks; shoot video in Inter­net mar­ket­ing busi­ness; shoot behind the scenes stuff; have lights then for video;  it’s a $1000 set for light­ing for videos; we’ll use strobes; we’ll use con­tin­u­ous lights that we use for video; if we take a shot and look at it in viewfinder, to see if it looks good; look for dead spots that don’t look good; some­times it’s too dark in back­ground, will take a con­tin­u­ous light behind her, up or down or side, you can con­trol all that stuff with how broad it is, how tight it is; shape the light and fill voids so pic looks bet­ter; it’s all sub­jec­tive; ‘what do you like’… wife and I will look at an image and she will say it looks great, and I will see some­thing that needs to be changed, or vice versa.  I’ll be, like, No, it’s com­pletely off..  some head-butting there, but this is art.. sub­jec­tive so there’d bet­ter be dif­fer­ent views.  There’s a core of it that is the same.  But what I think looks great might look hor­ri­ble to you.

Image Doc­tors:  Right!  Most of our lis­ten­ers use Nikon stuff, but we have a core that shoots with Canons.  You’re a Canon shooter right?

Tony:  Right.  And as Canon shoot­ers, we pray for you Nikon peo­ple.  (laugh­ter).  No, I’m kid­ding.  Lis­ten, it’s like Nikon and Canon are like say­ing Mer­cedes and BMW.  Both are pretty dang good.  My two cents?  Four-five years ago Nikon was WAY behind high end/SRL stuff. Canon laid an egg with the Mark 3 and Nikon really started kick­ing butt.  And that was good.  The com­pe­ti­tion it cre­ates between the two makes it bet­ter for us as photographers.

Image Doc­tors:  Absolutely.  It is the pho­tog­ra­pher that mat­ters.  What are you using these days in terms of bod­ies and for the shots you are using, what lens are you using?

Tony:  We have the Canon 1DS Mark 2, four years old.  That cam­era will have to be replaced here soon, maybe by the Mark 4, but we’ll have to see the reviews on the Mark 4; again, the Mark 3 didn’t do that good; the one I use the most is the 5DMark2; I absolutely love that cam­era; it’s very afford­able.  That Mark 2 five years ago was $8000 bucks.  When we’re talk­ing about spend­ing for pho­tog­ra­phy, and that’s just the body, they say the Mark4 (pre­mier cam­era) will be sell­ing for $5k.  The price of tech­nol­ogy has come down; so the 5D was $2500; it puts out images that are out­stand­ing; prices are com­ing down; the sen­sor is great; I have friends shoot­ing with a Nikon and images com­ing out of those cam­eras are absolutely awesome.

Image Doc­tors:  I’ve had a chance to use the 5DMark2, awe­some cam­era.. nice package.

Tony:   Yah.  I love it.. it’s easy to han­dle. I got the extra bat­tery pack with grip.  So you have the ver­ti­cal shut­ter.  For lenses 70–200 2.8 lens which I really like for shoot­ing boudoir stuff; you can be backed off the model 25–30 feet and shoot at that shal­low aper­ture and get awe­some images; we also use a 35–350 Canon lens.  We have an 85mm fixed 1.2 which we use a lot for por­traits.  It’s the sharpest lens I’ve ever used; can shoot an upclose por­trait 1.8 or 1.4 aper­ture and have one eye­ball in focus and one out.  Range is absolute incred­i­ble.  24–105 one of my favorite lens.  We used it in a hair salon I call it ‘Salon Girl’; almost a pinup pic; go to our glam­our photo gallery, a pic from that series is there..  sec­ond row, sec­ond photo; it’s like a pin-up, girl hold­ing a book, check­ered floor; we’d just pur­chased that lens and shot with it that day.  One of the best shots I’ve ever taken was that day in this series; check­ered floor, angle was right, light­ing was right; screwed up.. in back­ground on floor, could see power pack and cables; but my wife is so good with Pho­to­shop, you’d never know it!  She got rid of it all! (laughter)

Image Doc­tors:  Going back to pre­pared­ness, peo­ple still don’t under­stand what hap­pens on the back end.  Retouch­ing can be really important.

Tony:  Yes, it’s just as impor­tant.  The less you have to retouch the bet­ter.  Ulti­mate com­pli­ment with post pro­duc­tion, nobody ever says that was retouched.  You want to make it look as good as pos­si­ble with­out retouch­ing and mak­ing it obvi­ous you did Pho­to­shop.  The biggest no-no is to make the skin too smooth or whites of eyes too white or teeth too white.  Ridi­clourly white.  Fine line between that stuff.  But it’s a big part of game; go to our boudoir gallery…  three rows down, sec­ond pic over; same girl twice in same pic; that’s two dif­fer­ent pics w/same back­ground, and one, she is look­ing down and one she’s look­ing ; up; taken sec­onds apart; hold every­thing the same and bring her eyes to me; look at her hands—identical; hair—identical; mir­rored image; eyes are up in sec­ond pic; I flipped the pic and lay­ered it in in Pho­to­shop and blended it in.  Some­one may see that and hate it.  I love it.  I think it looks cool.  I don’t do that all that time, but i love this one. It’s a mat­ter of learn­ing what you like and how much expe­ri­ence you have in Pho­to­shop and know what options you have.

Image Doc­tors:  We’ll put links to your mul­ti­ple web sites..  facebook.com/imagedoctors.  Briefly men­tion what your sites are.

Tony:  www.mandarichmodels.com is our female pho­tog­ra­phy site with page for male models.

Image Doc­tors:  Some­how Jason and I for­got to look at the males.  (laughter)

Tony:  95 % of our mod­els are female ; we shoot male mod­els fit­ness and male mod­els also if they want to hire us.  Man­darich Mod­els site is more boudoir, lin­gerie, build­ing model port­fo­lios, point­ing out what we do so mod­els can read it.  Our other site is www.boxscorebabes.com an iphone appli­ca­tion web­site; we have an iphone app called BoxS­core­Babes.  It’s an app of 3 cat­e­gories, lin­geries, fit­ness, swim­suit or bikini; has girls on there and scrolling NFL scores and an RSSfeed.

Image Doc­tors:  Yeah, good place to get NFL scores!

Tony:  Yeah, we do sur­veys al l the time and that’s the only rea­son the guys buy it!  (laugh­ter)  Espe­cially in May!

Image Doc­tors:  You men­tioned this iphone app… is it free?

Tony:  We’ve had it out since Sept, with 99cent cost thru itunes or our site; today, we’re mak­ing that app free.  If you have an iphone or itouch you can down­load it.  All the pho­tographs are ours, no one elses.  The other thing we are launch­ing this week is the next face of Box Score­Babes; on that, you ‘ll see on the site, image of iphone, image of girl there; that’s the face of BoxS­core­Babes; that’s the first image you will see when the app starts; we are look­ing for new girl to replace that one; just for vari­ety; noth­ing wrong with the first one; she’s been great.  Females need to call us via the web­site to apply for that posi­tion; oth­ers can nom­i­nate a girl, obvi­ously with her per­mis­sion first; ask her first to be sure she wants to do it—don’t nom­i­nate her if she doesn’t (laugh­ter).  We’re pretty excited about that; it’s foot­ball related; close to Super­bowl launch­ing now.

Image Doc­tors: We can’t let you off the hook with­out get­ting your thoughts on the Super­bowl?  This week­end.  Should be a national hol­i­day, we should get Mon­day off to recover from the par­ties.  What do you think Tony?  I have a hunch which was you’re going.

Tony:  I’m going out on a limb.  I would not be sur­prised if it ends up being the #1 watched Super­bowl ever.  You have Indi­anapo­lis, you have the great­est quar­ter­back, you have a great team.   And then you have them going up against the Saints, so much his­tory there.    They’ve never been to Super­bowl; so much his­tory; the recent his­tory of adver­sity for the team and then the adver­sity with Kat­rina.  And then team pos­si­bly mov­ing four years ago.  And here they are four years later going to the Super­bowl.  And Drew Brees and the team hav­ing unbe­liev­able year; two hugely explo­sive offenses.  So many cool side sto­ries… Pey­ton Manning’s dad was a Saints QB; so much inter­est in it; it won’t sur­prise me that  Nielsen rat­ings will show most watched Super­bowl ever; should be excit­ing; high scor­ing; noth­ing to hide any­more like don’t do this play because every­body will know;  every­thing is laid out on the line. It should be pretty excit­ing.   My pick is Indy; I think it’s going to be one of those 42–35 or 42–38 Superbowls.

Image Doc­tors:  Should be fun to watch.  Look­ing for­ward to it.  Thanks so much, Tony, for giv­ing us your time.

Tony:  My plea­sure!  As I said in the begin­ning, one of my biggest pas­sions is pho­tog­ra­phy.  When peo­ple hire us to do this, it is a lot of work and set up.  But I end up gig­gling to myself; I LOVE doing this; and get­ting paid for it!

Image Doc­tors:  See­ing your pho­tos, I can see why!  Thanks tony.  Again, we found Tony through Face­Book. You can go there and leave com­ments about the show.