Indigosilver Studio in Wilmington, North Carolina is a boudoir studio without windows, none at all, in the room where the shooting happens. Lori Poole built the window light herself (custom daylight-balanced boxes behind fake windows on barn-door rollers), and the constraint became her style. This is The Boudoir Setting, the series in which Seven Rubies visits founding studios and asks every one of them the same questions.
Ramen noodle season
Every photographer knows the winter. For Lori and her husband Jeff, it had a name.
They were shooting weddings and seniors, and they had gotten far enough into running an actual business to start looking at their own numbers. What the numbers showed was brutal in its simplicity: in Wilmington, wedding season and senior season overlap completely. Two revenue streams, one calendar. And then nothing.
“The problem is when it’s not season, we call it ramen noodle season. It was a rough time to be a photographer, especially in the winter.”
So she went looking for something that would sell in January.
“I had the idea one year of like, you know what would do really good in wintertime is women will do boudoir for Valentine’s Day.”
She ran what was essentially a mini session marathon. Eight clients in one day, which she describes, accurately, as a beast of an undertaking. It was supposed to be a cash flow fix.
The day it stopped being a cash flow fix
What happened instead is that eight people walked into her studio and told her why they were there. One of them had spent years as a caretaker for her partner, who had recently died.
“Anybody who’s ever been a caretaker, you realize you lose yourself in that role. You no longer are your own person. You are this person that exists in service of this other person.”
“And when he did finally pass away, she’s like, I don’t know who I am anymore.”
That client was not booking a photo shoot. She was looking for herself.
“Story after story that I fell in love with it, and I was like, this is what I wanna do. Like, Jeff, you can have weddings. I’m out.”
It is worth sitting with how ordinary the beginning was. There was no calling, no moment of artistic clarity. There was a bad winter and a good idea about Valentine’s Day. The calling showed up afterward, in the room, in other people’s stories, which is how it tends to actually work.
What she is not doing
Ask Lori how she sets herself apart from other photographers and she does something unusual. She rejects the question first.
“My answer is that I don’t necessarily try to.”
She is candid that she used to try. Everyone new does it, she says, in any business or any genre: you study the competition, you ask how you are different, how you are better, whether you are at least doing what they are doing. Then, at some point, she stopped.
But there is a line she draws, and it is a real one.
“When I first got into this industry, there was a now defunct education group that was very much focused on helping women find their sexuality, and I have zero interest in that. It’s not part of my why.”
“My why is based more on just finding your own confidence and learning to see yourself differently. So for me, it’s about helping women find what makes them sexy as opposed to helping them find things about sex.”
If you have ever tried to explain boudoir to someone who has decided in advance what it is, that sentence does more work than a page of reassurance. It is also, quietly, the answer to the question most people are too polite to ask before they book, and a fair preview of what to expect once they do.
A boudoir studio without windows
The room is an argument. Indigosilver does not have windows. Not in the room where the shooting happens, anyway. Which is a strange thing to learn about a studio whose work looks like it was made in somebody’s sunlit house.
“This room, there’s no windows in this room, and it’s great, because we’ve had studios that have windows, and you can’t control the light as much.”
When they first moved in, they were not shooting boudoir at all. It was a traditional photo studio: lights, backdrops, no sets to speak of. The sets came later, and they came from a specific goal.
“The more I started doing boudoir, the more I was trying to replicate the feel of a real place that had real windows and real light.”
“It’s actually very contrived and very controlled, but I’m working against the building that we have. I’m trying to make my work look like I have windows, and I don’t have windows. And that has actually shaped my style a lot.”
The first fake window was a soft box hung behind a curtain on a light stand. It worked, except that every time a client needed to change, Lori had to crawl under the soft box and around the stand to move it out of the way. Eventually she asked Jeff whether they could clamp the thing to a barn door roller so she could just slide it aside.
He built it into a box instead.
That is the whole studio in one anecdote. And the sets get iterated like products, not decorated once and left alone.
“This is version 2.0 of this set. The bedroom is on version two or three by now. Kitchen’s on version one.”
Follow us as we visit Lori’s studio
Every set in the building was designed, built and iterated by the two of them, so the fastest way to understand Indigosilver is to let Lori walk you through it. Three minutes, every room, in her own words.
How she works when the pressure is on
There is a small thing she said about experimenting that tells you more about her practice than any philosophy statement.
“I don’t ever experiment on a new client. Because first time in, I have to nail it.”
Repeat clients get the invitation instead. “You wanna play? Do you wanna experiment?” They go up to the front of the studio where the lights and backdrops live, and they try something.
New client, deliver. Returning client, explore. It is a discipline, and it is also a promise, though she does not frame it as one.
Why she teaches
Lori is a mentor to a lot of photographers, and when you ask her what she gets out of it, she starts with the part most people leave out.
“Our studio was doing well. But what we realized is that we weren’t keeping any of it. We couldn’t figure out, like, where is the money going? We’re just bleeding out cash.”
“We are not unique in the fact that, like a lot of photographers, we love the photography side of things. We love creating, we love the art, and we don’t always love the numbers.”
They spent years learning to run a business, which is a thing almost nobody sets out to do when they pick up a camera. Teaching gave her something back she did not expect, which is a clear view of her own work.
“It wasn’t until I had to codify that into a concrete thought that I even realized that I was doing something repeatedly.”
And she is careful about the kind of educator she wants to be.
“I don’t ever want to come across as an educator or a mentor that there’s only one way to do things and that my way is the right way, because I don’t believe that.”
“I’m interested in how can I help you run the business that you want to run that feels aligned with the life that you wanna lead.”
The credentials behind the teaching
Lori Poole, M.Photog.M.Wed.Photog.Cr., holds three Professional Photographers of America degrees: Master of Photography, Master of Wedding Photography and Photographic Craftsman. Jeff Poole, M.Photog.Cr., holds Master of Photography and Photographic Craftsman. Both are PPA members, and Lori is an AIBP member.
She has taught posing, lighting, boudoir and business as an invited speaker at Imaging USA, Wedding and Portrait Photographers International, ShutterFest and Wedding MBA. Her work has appeared in Professional Photographer, Shutter, PhotoVision and SLR Lounge.
Two roads
Lori was an art major before she was a psych major, which turns out to explain most of it.
“I feel like I’ve kind of blended the two things, my passion for art, my passion for helping people. This is therapy for a lot of people, and I’m honored to be able to be a part of that, and to be a part of people’s journey on their ways to finding themselves or bettering themselves.”
Asked where she is headed, she describes running on two roads at once.
“First and foremost, I’m a photographer, and I don’t imagine that changing anytime soon. So I’m always trying to refine, invent a better mousetrap.”
The other road is the teaching. Both are open, and she does not seem in any hurry to pick. Which is a reasonable place to leave a studio that started with a bad winter and a good idea about February.
About the studio
Indigosilver Studio is in Wilmington, North Carolina. Lori Poole is its lead boudoir photographer; her husband Jeff Poole shares the space and photographs headshots and personal branding. Find Lori on Instagram at @indigosilver_boudoir.
The Boudoir Setting is a Seven Rubies series. We visit founding studios, ask every one of them the same questions, and publish what they say.