How to Take Jaw-Dropping Nudes

From setting and snapping to accessories and editing

Years ago, I took a series of photography courses and workshops. I wanted to learn how to take better photos of my kids. Now, I’m using those skills to take racy pictures of myself.

I used to avoid the camera lens as much as I could. I was self-conscious and hated the way I looked. The fewer photos of me there were, the better.

By being the one behind the camera, I could stay out of most of the shots. And if I set one up, I could have complete control over it.

The more I played with the camera, learned how to edit and enhance photos, and got better at setting up lighting and composing shots, the more I wanted to experiment.

And I kind of wanted to take nude photos of myself — for no one else to see other than me. I wanted to see if I could take such a good shot that it didn’t matter how I felt about my body — it would make me look sexy and make me feel attractive.

I could never bring myself to strip for my camera, though. I was terrified of the result. I could only imagine one outcome. I would take a few photos, and as I looked at them, I’d feel worse about myself.

Over the years, I got better at working the camera. I also got a little bolder. I was willing to take more risks. And I started to reclaim my sexuality in a big way.

Then I started talking with a guy and he showed me some of his dick pics. But they weren’t ordinary dick pics. They were gorgeous. They were artistic. They weren’t just hot, they were downright inspiring.

But what really motivated me to turn the camera on myself is the way he talked about those photos. Taking inventive dick pics gave him a creative outlet, it was fun to take and share them, but mostly it was a major confidence boost. It was a way to make him feel better about his body.

And fuck could I ever use some of that.

I got the urge to take some nudes of my own and see if I could get the same outcome. I kept hesitating and talking myself out of it, until one day I was undressing before a shower and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Specifically, my tits.

They were barely hidden by my unbuttoned plaid shirt and they looked good — about as good as my tits ever could.

I got the urge to capture them in that moment.

I told myself I could just delete the photos if they made me feel bad about myself. No one ever had to see them.

So, I grabbed my phone and took the best shots of my tits that I could.

And it was fun. Really fun. Instead of deleting them, I shared them, which made me nervous and excited all at once.

Those photos made me feel good about myself and about my body. They made me feel a tiny bit sexier.

And it escalated.

From there, I took photos any time I was having a particularly good day or just needed a confidence boost. I took photos of my tits while I laid in the bath. I took close-up shots of my pussy. I got some of my ass.

It started as an experiment. It became a habit.

Taking nudes made me realize that learning how to take photos didn’t just teach me how to increase the quality of my shots. It also gave me control over them. I knew how to capture only the parts of me I wanted to show and display them how I wanted.

I could take nudes in a way that felt completely safe to me.

And I’m glad I did, because it’s been incredibly empowering.

I always assumed I couldn’t take sexy photos of myself because I wasn’t smoking hot. But taking nudes taught me that it’s about working with what you have and showcasing the parts of your body you love the most.

Now, I’m convinced that everyone can take sexy photos of themselves, even frumpy moms like me. And we should, because we all have a sexy side and we deserve to feel it, embrace it, and show it off once in a while.

That’s what I want to help you do. From setting up the camera, taking the shots, to editing the photos, I want to share some of my best tips for taking amazing nudes that show you at your sexiest.

Your Phone Is Fine

For a long time, I refused to take photos of myself unless it was with a DSLR camera. I was so self-conscious I didn’t want a permanent record of my appearance unless it was shot in the best possible quality.

Insisting on a DSLR didn’t result in better nudes, though. It resulted in fewer ones.

Taking the camera out and setting it on the tripod is usually how I get my best photos, and it’s fun and makes you feel legit. But it’s also really fucking inconvenient.

And it’s completely unnecessary, too. The cameras on phones these days are really good. You’re not compromising by using them.

I take most of my nudes on my phone now. I love the spontaneity and ease of it. If I ever feel cute for a second, I can capture it almost immediately and move on with the rest of my day.

You’re not shooting a spread for Playboy — you’re taking a few pics for yourself (and whoever is lucky enough to receive your nudes), so give yourself a tiny bit of leeway. You can snap and share some great quality nudes, even if they’re not at the resolution a photojournalist would insist on.

Clean Up Your Shooting Space

Take a moment to think about the space around you. What’s going to show up in the background of your photo? Is there a lot of clutter or anything visually distracting?

Quickly tidying up before you take a photo can go a long way to improving the look of your nudes.

You can be forgiven a little bit of clutter for candid shots. We all have those photos we took in an instant because we looked cute. We can still be proud of them even if we left the hairbrush on the bathroom counter or didn’t wash away a couple of smudges from the mirror.

Every space has its limitations, but you can usually find a way to be strategic about them.

Sometimes, I’ll place myself in a specific spot so my body can obscure things that would draw attention from it, like an outlet on the wall, a lightswitch, a thermostat, or a towel hanging in the background.

If you play with angles and crop, you can make due even if there’s only a really small part of your living space that isn’t too busy visually.

And when I take a nude in the bathroom, I’ll shut the shower curtain. It’s a quick and easy way to hide the bottles of soap and shampoo that could catch the eye.

Play with Angles

When taking nudes, angles make all the difference. Changing the position of the camera and of yourself can make your body look completely different.

Taking photos from a higher angle is slimming, but it usually results in a more feminine look. If you want to make yourself look more masculine, it’s better take the shot head on, or even slightly from below.

There are other rules of thumb, too. But the best thing you can do is just give yourself time to play around with your camera. Change its position until you find one that gives you the most flattering results.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with angles that don’t always feel like the natural way to hold a camera but give good results. I’ve taken POV shots to capture what my body looks like from my perspective. I’ve taken shots of my pussy from up high, holding the camera at a distance from it. The more I mess around with my camera, the more I discover ways of exposing myself.

How you angle yourself in relation to the camera matters, too. Again, this is mostly about trial and error. Hold the camera in place and shift your leg around. Flex your thigh muscles to see how that looks, then try it completely relaxed. Arch your back and see if giving your ass a bit of pop makes it look juicier. Move your shoulders in different positions and see if it changes the way your tits look in the photo.

You might look kind of silly holding your phone at weird angles or propping yourself up on the arm of your couch to get the perfect pose. Don’t worry about it — no one will see anything that isn’t in the frame.

Use Mirrors

Mirrors are an important accessory when you’re taking nudes.

Use them to practice poses, to find your best naked look, and to photograph angles that would be hard to achieve if you were pointing the camera directly at yourself.

You can also bounce the camera off the mirror to get a bigger picture. I can only hold my phone out a certain distance from my body. Shooting at the mirror lets me show more of my body without being restricted to a few awkward angles.

Mirrors are also handy because I use an iPhone to take most of my nudes. It’s got a double-facing camera, which is really helpful, but the higher quality camera happens to be the one on the back of the phone. So, when I want to actually look at what I’m capturing, I have to use the inferior front-facing camera — unless I’m using the mirror. Then I can get a clear look at the screen while still capturing myself with the better camera.

Crop Strategically

Cropping lets you showcase only the parts you want to display and leave out the parts of your body that make you feel more self-conscious.

There’s no shame in leaving part of yourself out of the shot. The whole point of taking nudes is to make yourself feel hot. So, if there’s an aspect of your body that you don’t feel so great about, go ahead and cut it from the shot.

You can either crop while taking the photo, by angling your camera to capture only what you want. Or you can capture a bigger picture and crop it when you’re editing the photo.

Another option is to leave more in the shot but cover yourself up strategically. You can take a full body shot with your tits popped out of your shirt so that your stomach is still covered. Or you can throw a blanket over your thighs if you’d rather hide them but want to show off your fantastic ass.

Not every nude has to be a full body shot. In fact, some of the most interesting, creative, and titillating ones make really good use of cropping as a way of accentuating something specific and leaving the rest to the imagination.

Most importantly, it’s a way to have controlled vulnerability. It gives you a way of baring your body without making yourself feel so exposed that you’re embarrassed by it.

Work With Composition

The composition of the shot is basically how all the elements in the photo work with each other. How the different aspects you capture relate, or how the things you leave out are implied by what’s in the frame.

The guys holding cans of soda next to their cocks for scale are technically making use of composition in their dick pics. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

I mean something a little more creative. Like holding an open book to mask your face while letting your soft eyes peek over the cover. Or even cosplaying your cock if you want to go to those lengths.

One simple sexy trick is to just show half of something. Let the top half of your cock show, with the rest hiding under a towel or blanket. Lift your skirt to show just one of your ass cheeks. Have only one side of your body in the shot so only one breast is showing. Let your recipient’s dirty mind fill in the rest.

Make Your Nipples Hard

Once, we got nudes from Mr. Austin’s ex-girlfriend. She wanted to send something sexy to her boyfriend but she wanted feedback on them first.

Yes, my husband is on remarkably good terms with his exes. But the reason I’m mentioning this is because of the commentary she gave on her own photos.

“I should’ve made my nipples hard,” she texted. “It didn’t occur to me because I’m alone and no one was here to make them hard for me.”

And she was right. That’s a simple little touch that can make your nudes a little hotter.

Hardening your nipples makes them look perkier. They’ll look more defined. It signals arousal, too, which is nice because I like thinking that the nudes I’m admiring were taken by someone who was enjoying herself and feeling in a frisky mood.

If you’re taking a shot of your pussy, you can go with a more demure look, or take a dirtier shot by making yourself wet first.

For the guys, the big decision is how hard you want your cock to be.

Typically, the move is to get as rock hard as possible and capturing your cock at its firmest. But there’s nothing wrong with displaying your cock in its natural soft state. And of course, there’s always the option of giving it a little blood flow so that it’s not exactly hard but it still looks like it hangs down heavy.

Light Like a Pro

Lighting is a huge factor in how your photos turn out, but it’s not always easy to get it perfectly right.

Natural light is always best if you have enough of it. Unless they’re really bright and really white, artificial lights will make your skin look a bit orangey.

One of the most common lighting problems with selfies is that they often mix natural light and artificial lights. Some parts of the shot are lit from the sunlight beaming through a window, while the rest are bathed in the light from a lamp or an overhead light bulb. That makes it really hard to color correct the shots because you’ll want to get rid of the orange hue but it will only be on some spots.

If you want to use artificial lighting, you can get a ring light or an umbrella light. There are affordable options for each and they’ll give you even lighting, especially when you’re shooting at night.

Do Some Light Editing

You don’t want to edit a photo so much that you look like a different person, but you want to do enough so that it shows you in your best light.

A lot of people think that editing a photo is falsifying it and that sending an edited nude is misleading. And yeah, you could photoshop your hips so they’re slimmer or whatever. But for the most part, editing a photo is just about making it pop.

The raw photo you take with your phone or your camera doesn’t even look like a copy of the real thing anyway. It usually comes out looking flat and dull compared to the way you would look in real life.

When you don’t overdo it, editing the photo actually makes it look brighter and more realistic.

My photo editing software of choice is Lightroom, but Snapseed is a good free alternative. I’ve used it and I thought it was great.

No matter what I’m using, though, I’ll do the same thing to most of the photos I take.

First, I’ll brighten them so they’re lighter, especially when I took the photo somewhere dark, like my bathroom.

Then, I add contrast to give more depth to the photos. I’ll also usually bump up the shadows a touch and bump down the blacks for more depth and to give the photo a more realistic look.

If the shot came out a little too orange, I’ll cool it down to deal with that problem.

If I want to bring out and emphasize a particular focal point in the photo, I’ll use vignettes to frame it (those are the shadowy outlines around the photo). Though going too hard on a vignette can be a little much. Ideally, you can keep it very feathered so it’s a little more subtle.

I’ll apply some noise reduction to make the image look smoother and softer.

I’ll sharpen it to make sure it doesn’t look flat and enhance my eyes to make them pop.

And okay, yes, depending on the photo I will get rid of temporary imperfections. Anything that’s permanently part of my skin, I’ll leave alone. But something like an insect bite or a bruise, I’ll erase out of the photo by cloning a speck of my skin and laying it over the blemish.

Once I’ve gone through those steps, my body looks more like it does when I look at it in the mirror. And if I’m going to flash my tits at someone or share my ass with them, I want to make sure they look at least as good as they do in person.

Another thing I like to play with is an app called Graphite Sketchbook that turns photos into sketched versions of them that look like detailed drawings. It’s fun and I love the way a lot of them look, but it also lets you feel less exposed — like it’s you but not quite you that’s in the photo.

It’ll even save photos that disappoint me a bit. When I don’t exactly love the results I got, I can filter some shots through the app and they often come out looking nice.

The editing phase is also where you can decide to make your photos black and white. Black and white nudes can be really classy, tasteful, and artsy.

It’s also a lot more forgiving. If I’ve taken a photo in bad lighting and can’t color correct it, making it monochrome and pumping up the contrast can result in a very nice artsy shot. And putting your photos in black and white can sometimes help you mask some of the little, less noticeable things that make you self-conscious.

Accessorize Your Phone

If you take nudes with your phone, there are three accessories that will make it easier for you.

The one I recommend the most is a very good, sturdy phone case.

I drop my phone a lot when I’m posing for it. And the more creative I try to get with my angles and the way I position my body, the more likely the phone is to slip from my fingers.

I made the mistake of buying a phone case because it was cute, not because it was tough. Now, there’s a crack in my screen and I was so upset about it that I never even got the shot I was attempting when I dropped it.

I’ve also found PopSockets to be really helpful. You can hold the phone more comfortably with one stuck to the back of it. You’ll be able to rest it between two fingers instead of using your whole hand to grip it, which can help you get better shots.

A PopSocket also helps you prop up the phone, which gives you more options when you’re figuring out angles.

And even though they sometimes get mocked, there’s nothing wrong with using a selfie stick. A selfie stick lets you compensate for the finite length of your merely human arms. The farther away you can hold your phone, the easier it can be to get a good photo of your body.

It’s a fun way of getting some experimental shots, too, or snapping some from really high angles.

DSLR Camera Settings

If you’re using a DSLR camera to take your nudes, the settings on the camera will matter.

Shooting with a DSLR in manual mode is a lot less user friendly than using a smartphone camera. But the main things you have to be concerned with are your camera’s ISO, the aperture, and the shutter speed.

Adjusting the ISO will make the camera more or less sensitive to light. The lower your ISO, the darker your photo will be. The less natural light you have, the higher you need to set your ISO to get anything usable.

The general rule when setting your ISO is to keep it as low as you can while still capturing a clear photo. The higher you set it, the noisier (grainier) the photo will be.

How you set the aperture will determine the focal point of the photo you take. A wider aperture will give you a clear focal point in the middle of the image, while blurring things around it. As you narrow your aperture, more of the shot will be in focus.

If you’re brave enough to take action shots in the nude, err on the side of using a narrower aperture. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of blur from your movements.

Shutter speed is just what it sounds like — it’s how long your shutter stays open when you take a photo. In practical terms, that means it will affect how blurry your photo is.

Blurry isn’t necessarily bad. It can be a way to take abstract nudes or represent a little bit of motion.

Using a fast shutter speed will freeze movement at a particular instance (that’s how sports photographers capture key moments in crisp detail). A slower shutter speed will catch more of the movement and create a blended effect.

Once you understand what those three settings do, the best thing you can do is to just fuck around with them. Before you bare yourself for your camera, take lots of photos of whatever you’ve got near you and see what happens when you play around with the settings.

When I was taking courses, I would practice by sitting on the living room floor and taking photos of my kids while they were playing. That gave me a good sense for how to set the camera. But you can use anything. Your cat, your dog, flowers, a potato — whatever you’ve got. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to get great shots of yourself.

Share Your Sexy-Ass Nudes (Or Don’t)

Sharing my nudes has been part of the fun. Sending them to my husband is a good way to titillate him, flirt with him, or even get a little foreplay going. Sharing my partially covered tits on Instagram was a lot more nerve-wracking, but still a little thrilling.

But that’s not always the point, and I don’t share most of the nudes I take. At least three quarters of the shots I’ve liked and kept, I haven’t even shown to my husband.

It doesn’t matter. Taking good photos of my naked body is still validating even if I’m the only one who gets to see them. And looking through my best nudes is a good, quick pick-me-up when I’m not feeling that great about myself.

In the end, taking nudes is something you do for you. The kind of nudes you take should reflect that.

That means not only taking good quality shots you can feel proud of, but also taking photos you’re comfortable with and that make you feel good about yourself.

Spreading your legs and taking a closeup of your pussy might be really far out of your comfort zone, and that’s fine. Sexy can be subtle. It’s the tease, the mood you’re representing, and the little peek at your body that matter the most.

If that just means undoing a few extra buttons to show more cleavage than you would in public, then that’s great. Pop those buttons and show yourself off. Because it’s your sexiness, not just your skin, that your nudes should show.

And if you can do it without dropping your phone and cracking the screen, even better.

Let’s keep in touch! Sign up for my weekly newsletter (I won’t send you anything without your enthusiastic consent!)

❤ If you liked this post, you might also love: