You Can Be Anything: How Your Privacy Is Protected

M any of us grew up hearing that phrase: you can be anything you want. I like to modify it and say you can be anyone you want. What you do doesn’t define you, you are defined by more than your career or status as a couple or a parent. Certainly, all of these things make up who you are but not a single one of them defines you on their own. Our job (and primary goal) with each session is to showcase all sides of you. The softer sweet side, the rough and tumble side, maybe the darker handcuffed side. 😉 Let’s explore that a little…

Sample JVZ photo release form

Professional Protection

We guarantee this to everyone. Meaning it is not our place to ever divulge what you do for a living. We have photographed many executives, retail workers, entrepreneurs and stay at home moms, but we’ve also photographed elementary school teachers, deans of colleges, police officers, judges, and public figures. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know some of these women would be in some serious hot water if her photos were made public. Your career, your livelihood matters to us.

Personal Protection

All of that said, there are still many women who choose to keep their images private and are not comfortable for one reason or another with her images being online or in the studio. The reasons are different for each woman and none of them are any of my business. I don’t ask or push for this. This is a choice each woman makes with every image we take of her.

Photo Release

Many photographers require you to sign a full photo release prior to your session starting. I have seen this in many styles of photography and it is the standard practice. To me, this makes sense for family photos or headshots even, but for boudoir, it just doesn’t. These images are private and often contain nudity, if it were me, I wouldn’t want my images online without A) me seeing them first and B) without my explicit written permission. It’s this reason we don’t even discuss sharing your images with you until you’ve seen them yourself. They do not leave the privacy of our studio staff ever until you’ve looked at them. At your reveal, we go over our Photo Release in detail and it is ALWAYS okay for you to say no. What that means is we will never share any of your images outside of studio staff for any reason. There are also 2 types of limited sharing options. The first is you saying “I give permission to use only images where my face is not identifiable”. Pretty self-explanatory, and most of these images that we would share are essentially images of your body. The other type of limited permissions is you going through your proof sheet and giving absolutely yes’s and no’s on images you’re okay with us sharing.

Full Permission Doesn’t Always Mean Everything

There are some things that should be private. As such we never share any nudity on any of our social media sites or even our website. I know many others do, but again, I think somethings should be private, and your nipples and your genitals are one of them. So, if you do decide to give us full permission (and most clients do), it is under the following guidelines:

• We will never use your name with minor exceptions: if you choose to write an article for us about your session and you’ve given us permission to do so, we will use your first name and last initial for the author of the post, UNLESS you’d rather use a fake name in which case we’re okay with that too.
• We don’t use your initials anywhere either. This means the files we use online have also been renamed to ensure there is nothing what-so-ever to point back to you.
• We don’t use personal details about your life. We might generically say in a blog post about you being a mom and/or a career woman and that you came in for photos for yourself or for your spouse, but we keep it vague. This is to further keep your privacy and not allow anyone the slightest confirmation that the photos are indeed YOU.
• We never share any images with nipples or genitals showing.
• We never share images with your name on them. We’ve seen many customized jersey’s with family names printed on the back, those are never shared.
• Social media: we never tag you in any images and we don’t allow others to tag you on our page either. There are 3 sets of eyeballs on that site all the time to ensure this is caught when and if it happens. Facebook, in particular, will not allow for us to have to comment turned on but tagging turned off, so we watch it like hawks. IF any clients are tagged, we copy the comment and delete it immediately. We then private message the person who left the comment and thank them for their comment and explain our privacy policy. We then private message our client and share the comment with them so they still get to see the nice thing their friend said about them without the exposure to the world.

And we do have a thank you gift for anyone who does give us full permission, but I’ll wait to share that with you in the studio. :)We take your privacy very seriously and more important than that, your images are always within your control. I built this company through the eyes of a client not the eyes of a photographer because I was a boudoir client before I was a boudoir photographer. Which means everything we do is done through your lens, not ours.

XOXO,
Sara