How to Work With Swimsuit Models Part 3 of 3

So, congratulations, guy. You got a pretty girl to pose for you in a bikini. Now anything you snap will be an instant hit on Flickr. Guys will go wild for your photos. But it doesn’t mean your photos are worth crap. It just means the girl was pretty. Boy have I learned this. There is a difference between art and snapshots of pretty girls with an expensive camera.

I do think that you can make a beautiful, sensual photograph that celebrates a models beauty which is also artful and well crafted.

Going through my galleries of swimsuit photos, it was hard to pick photos for this article because not all my photos are without room for improvement. In fact, none of them are. So the photos here are to illustrate a point, with whatever flaws they may have.

I’m going to be blunt for a moment. I’m pretty good at blunt in real life.  Great swimsuit photos have lots of curve and highlight body parts like legs, thighs, tummies, rear ends, breasts, shoulders, backs, etc. etc, etc.  But, the eyes have it. If the face is in the photo, then the eyes should be the focal point. It is the face that communicates with the viewer and it is the eyes that seduce. People communicate with their faces, not their boobs.

The following photograph has plenty of issues. We ended up shooting at mid-day with the August sun shining almost straight down on us.  But it shows what happens when you stretch out the body. Laila is a beautiful girl by any means, but she is helped out here by curving her back and stretching out her tummy. Her legs are bent, her arm and elbow are up, her right arm is down and shows muscle tone. With the sun above her, the shadows highlight the muscle tone in her right arm, give a stronger line to the back of her leg and define the shape of her breast. All these elements make her look her best.

The photo below shows a lovely young girl in a bikini, in very shallow water and the beach edge. The ripples in the water and the line of the beach add shape and character to the photo. Ida is posed with her torso twisted a little and her left arm stretched down to the water and her left leg pointed out with her other leg pulled back a little. This give her a kind of “S” shape her head tilted back with the hair flowing downward begins the visual line from her head down to her toes. With her left leg extended like this, it highlights the shape of her bottom and accentuates the line of her long legs.

In this photo, Jesyka is laid out on her back with a leg raised. The light is from her right and left, making shadows that define her curves. She is laying to increase the sense of a flat tummy and her chest is thrown up.  With the camera angle low, her body makes a diagonal line across the frame and gives the viewer a full view of her curvy shape from head to toe.  The light and shadows thrown on her chest accent those features.

Deanna was a lot of fun to work with. We shot this in the early morning about 7:15 am with the sun coming over the mountains. My assistant used a reflector to fill out shadow and give her a bit more of a golden tone. The white bikini contrasts against her skin color and really jumps out. Deanna is turned about 45 degrees from the sun and her pose with the knees in the sand is not how she would have posed. We had her move her knees further apart. The increased angles make her stunning figure even more remarkable, helped flatten an already flat tummy and made her hip bones pop out.

There is so much more to say about working with swimsuit models, but I'll save that for another day.

Later this week I'll write about scouting for locations.