In the mean time . . .

Don’t forget Valentine’s Day is just around the corner! And we have PERFECT Gifts for ‘him’ or Gift Certificates for ‘her’. Don’t be afraid to email us and ask about our sessions!

catwoman ks_vstoosh rd_uscpanty sq_bed a4 asmall janabw3

gallery . tommehilton @ gmail . com

*don’t forget the . between gallery and tommehilton!

Why Boudoir?  You deserve to be beautiful. Eternally.

We chose to celebrate the human body in it’s most beautiful form, it’s natural form. Many women have issues feeling beautiful . . . and this isn’t an issue many women have after babies or as they get older. This is an issue that we have noticed in young women as well . . . even in some of our brides! How is this we ask? How is it that we don’t feel comfortable and beautiful in our own skin? I mean, let’s face it . . . no one is perfect. No one has that body that has been airbrushed on the front of magazines . . . and those that do . . . God has blessed you. But that doesn’t mean we all are not beautiful and that we all can’t feel as beautiful as the lady on the magazine. We should all feel beautiful in our own skins . . . and know that how we were made, is beautiful.

I get such a ‘high’ photographing Boudoirs by the reaction I get from my clients. Hearing the, ‘Oooh, Tomme.’ and the, ‘I can’t believe you made me look so pretty.’ and the, ‘I can’t wait to show these off, I look so good!’ — these make me smile soooo big! Knowing I showed a woman how beautiful she REALLY is. I helped her. I helped her in a way that she will never forget. In a way that will make her smile more . . . OR not be scared to wear the bikini on the beach . . . OR show off her shoulders at 50 . . . OR not be scared to ‘drop the towel when he’s looking’.

And to those of you who think Boudoir is similar to ‘soft porn’ . . . think again. I have many clients who don’t get naked for me. Wearing a cute nighty and some heels is enough to make a woman feel like she is the hottest thing that crossed his mind! There are MANY ways to photograph Boudoirs without getting naked! If you need help brainstorming ideas for your session, let us know! We will be happy to help give suggestions that will suit you!

Also, Boudoir photography is not just for the upcoming bride or the perfect anniversary present or for the long lasting married couples . . . Boudoir Photography is for Y O U.  You chose who you want the session to be for! Sometimes, it’s best to do a session just for Y O U.

.  .  .  .  .

Thank you for reading and understanding our our vision of Boudoir Photography . . . Now, we want you to do the same for us! However, yours doesn’t need to be so l-o-n-g . . . just a lil’ blurb on why YOU want a Boudoir Session.

Submit a photo of YOU and a blurb on ‘Why you chose Boudoir Photography’ to our email.  We love to understand why YOU chose to do Boudoir Photography. We will post your lil’ blurb to our Blog and Facebook along with your image and then YOU VOTE! Most votes will win a
FREE flirt Album (a $250 value)  with purchase of promotional session!
Our normal Sessions run about $500. We are giving this lucky winner the chance to have her Boudoir Session for a slight discount. Our Promotional Session values at $400. The Session includes a two hour boudoir session + two outfit changes.

Please enter and get the word out about Loft Noire! Remember, the Contest ends January 31, 2012 at midnight!!

Don’t forget to email you image and blurb to us at –  gallery . tomme hilton @ gmail . com — don’t forget the . between gallery and tomme!

gallery.tommehilton@gmail.com

So, Tomme Hilton Gallery collaborated with a little Loft Noire wanted to show that women don’t have to be getting married, having babies or have a happy family to take photos. OR even get completely naked to feel beautiful!!

One Friday, we got together a few fun ladies (including myself, Erica Billingsley, Tomme Hilton Gallery’s Assistant) and spent the day shooting! We acted like kids again… trying on different outfits, playing in make up, posing, etc. We litterally tore my entire house apart. It was a dissaster! My livingroom and foyer became the ‘studio’ while my dinning room and bedroom/bathroom became the dressingroom. We had one girl blowing up balloons and moving furniture while the rest of us were doing hair, makeup and gettin dressed for the next shot. Laugh. It was so much fun.

If you haven’t seen some of the photos from our photoshoot on Facebook, please look at the below images!!

bubbleleg catwoman jesslolly jessside jill jilleyes jilllolly jj50s jj50s_2 jjblowbubbles jjbusstop jjbusstop_2 jjlegs jjtogether jlugagedrop seriouscandy sexyleg streetwalk

{The SEXY HEELS Boudoir Session}
A Boudoir Session + Hair & Makeup + Album
ONLY $800

Every woman has that pair of heels in her closet. Where is that girl that used to feel sexy? Get the shoes out and let them dance. Find that girl you used to know.

BUT HURRY! Offer ends February 5, 2010 and the bookings are coming fast!
*Gift Certificates Available.

Email for bookings at gallery.tommehilton@gmail.com

…..

Everyone who is reading this has at least one thing in common: The love of wedding porn. If you aren’t familiar with the term, let me enlighten you. Wedding porn is the visual embodiment of all things nuptial related. It often results in squees, jitters, listmaking, and sighs of brides to be, groans, silences, and nausea from grooms to be, and fond memories from married women. For the occasional groom: Flashbacks and rolled eyes.

Yes. All of us here love the wedding, whether it is ours or someone else’s. We come here to look at the pictures, take inspiration, lavish in the beauty, and then, just once (or maybe twice), applaud ourselves.

The other thing we have in common is love of The Tomme. For most of us, Tomme has entered into our life, or the life of our loved ones, and captured beautiful images on our wedding day. She’s managed to stop time and give you images of that day that went by in such a haze that when you paused to listen to the voicemails or watch the video, you don’t even remember half of the things that were said.

And so, I present to you (in the best of my bride frazzled memory), a day in a wedding with Tomme:

Firstly, the most important thing about anything ever is time. I’m a bit neurotic about time, so I made sure that we had (in our ideal nothing ran late schedule) 3 hours before the ceremony for pictures and one between ceremony and reception for pictures. That’s four total hours just for pictures. Cuh-razy am I. And you know what? I wanted more. But okay. Here’s a snapshot of your day with Tomme if you’re crazy like me.

7:00 am: My bridesmaids and I rolled out of bed, kissed our menfolk and were off to the hair dresser. We had a hair cut appointment crisis the day before, so we had one bridesmaid who had to get her hair cut that morning. Luckily, the only one who was planning to get styled was I. We arranged for our make up friend (awesome wedding present) to meet us at the salon to do makeup there.

9:25 (ouch, the plan was to leave at 9:10): We arrive at our ceremony reception site and guess who is there and waiting! My already dressed man and Tomme and Erica! I was so relieved to see Tomme there in her very own car. It has been in the shop the entire week before and she had only gotten it back on Friday. She had been ready to rent a car to come, but that expense on top of a transmission! Yikes! Hugs and kisses were delivered all around and Tomme went straight to my shoes. I was preoccupied for a bit getting things organized (our wedding was completely planned and set up by myself and our family and friends, no vendors etc for that) while Tomme and Erica had fun with kayaks, shoes, buckets, bicycles, ladders, my dress, flowers, leaves, and all kinds of creativity. I kept coming back to see what they were doing because it just looked so neat! Greg (the husband, I guess I should mention his name!) and I shoot ourselves, but I know I’m definitely not on that level of creativity. I think I heard Tomme say “Purple shoes!” at least three or four times.

*From here on the time is an estimate because I took my watch away from myself.*

10:00: Time to get dressed! Tomme, I, and my mother went into the downstairs apartment where we were holed up to get dressed. This consisted of open windows and Tomme teetering precariously in a chair because the light was poor, and pulling my dress up very, very slowly.  After this, we ventured outside for my portraits. Erica went to take care of a very patient Greg.

I have to admit that before the day got there, I was very anxious about locations to do our photos. I didn’t think there would be a lot of opportunity for photos at our actual location so I was obsessing over other locations we could travel to. My stress was unneeded. Tomme apparently had more than enough to fuel her creativity. I was able to go on auto pilot, just be happy that I was there, and forget about the time for bit! Tomme directed and I followed as clumsily as I could, and from the images I’ve seen, I look like a super model! I didn’t feel the least bit self conscious, was totally at ease, and just had fun being me, being dressed up, and knowing I was getting married. I can’t even remember if we really talked. I think we did while shooting, but then there’s that fuzzy bride memory.

Finally around 10:40 or so, we decided to head downtown to the Sheraton Hotel on the roof of which Greg and I shared our first flirty moments with each other. Tomme even makes walking down the street a photo shoot! Not an opportunity slips past her or Erica. Tomme was walking in the front occasionally jogging forward and turning around to snap pictures, and Erica was behind doing the same. I definitely felt like a movie star with an entourage posing in front of buildings, crossing the street, kissing, and hugging. Once inside the Sheraton, Greg, Tomme, and I shared private elevator ride to the top floor *wink*. Here we discovered Greg was not a fan of my sticky lip gloss!

**side ramble about the amazing-ness of Tomme**

All lip gloss aside; I do have to say that in both shoots I’ve done with Tomme thus far, Greg is her crowning achievement in my eyes. As much as I look at the pictures and say “Man, she made me look HAWT!,” the primary thing that sticks out in my mind is just how comfortable she makes Greg in front of the camera. Before our engagement shoot, I was so worried, because he has always been a behind the camera person, and let’s face it: Men don’t generally like having their picture taken. Greg is a photographer, his dad is a photographer, his uncle was a photographer, etc. Comfort being the subject isn’t exactly in his DNA. However, Tomme gets to talking with him fabulously and he just loosens and flows to the point that he even helps my awkward self move to where I need to be!

**return to timeline**

Once we were met by the rest of the group, we sadly realized that the roof of the Sheraton had been changed substantially, but we still made it work. Tomme once again was a fearless leader, moving things about the bar that the roof had become and directing us where she wanted. Hope the wait staff upstairs didn’t mind us relocating everything. I’m pretty sure none of us put it back.

Even waiting on the elevator shots were being taken. Even going back down the elevator more shots were taken. One I especially love is of the two of us coming out of the elevator holding the doors and kissing. So much time utilization. If I did that at work, I’d be so productive. Instead, I’m writing this! Oops.

12:25pm: Then of course, we return back to our ceremony and reception site predictably a bit behind time. At this point, my response is “What the hell? It’s a wedding!” The ceremony was supposed to start at 12:30! At this point, I honestly lost track of Tomme until after the ceremony, for obvious reasons. One surprise however, was Erica up in the balcony when we were getting ready to walk down the aisle! I saw my sister waving like an idiot up at the balcony of the house and I, in big sister fashion, look at her as if she is an idiot. Lo and behold, Erica is upstairs taking pictures! Every angle covered.

During the ceremony, I had absolutely no awareness of photographers anywhere. The only thing I was aware of was my shaking knees, Greg making a silly face, my telling him not to make me laugh at the point in my vows where I was promising to make him laugh, and ending up laughing instead of crying. If you haven’t gotten there yet, I hope your ceremony is just like that. It was awesome.

After the ceremony, the herding of cats commenced. Greg’s family was fabulous. They were where they needed to be when they needed to be. My family however, wandered off immediately if their picture wasn’t being taken at that moment exactly. (To any of my family potentially reading this, I love you but it’s true and you know it!) Tomme’s skill with Greg apparent does work on other beings. She was able to make my parents hug (Squee) and look cute and lovey! I think we got some nice family portraits, and I have a pretty awesome picture of me almost licking my sister’s face that I’m  pretty excited about. Who would have thought? Family pictures made fun!

What I loved though, is that after this, after stealing our rings for ring shots, and the eating and everything, Tomme took advantage of every spare moment to snap a few more pictures, steal us away for a few more moments, and in reality it gave us a nice bit of alone time away from all the chattering family. Alone time with Tomme is definitely worth it. She gave us a chance to just talk, be silly with each other, be silly with her, and have fun. I think Greg’s mom knew where to find us whenever we weren’t readily available by following the sound of shutter clicks.

Tomme initially entered into my life as a potential wedding vendor who I begged and pleaded with to shoot my wedding, knowing I couldn’t afford her. I was just that in love with her work. I eventually managed to get money wrangled in, and we managed to work up a deal. With all of her editing (and trust me guys, she puts a lot of work into her editing), she’s on her computer a lot, we became chat buddies and began talking and texting regularly. My car is a local only vehicle (barely that anymore) and we live in Columbia, so our first face to face meeting was at our engagement session in Charleston. I’m really glad to be able to say, that not only have I found someone I can continue to have chronicle big moments in mine and my family’s life (I’m so going to be doing maternity pics one day down the line), but also a really good girlfriend and confidant.

The moral of the story from this Bride is this: Love your photographer, be willing to do that crazy stuff she comes up with, give her the time she needs and your pictures will show the results, and practice smiling for hours on end a few days before the wedding, otherwise your face will hurt.

…..

What a great blog! Thank you Natalie and Greg for taking the time to write about your experience! We enjoyed sharing your day with you! It was a great trip to Columbia! Hopefully out next trip will be to TRASH THAT DRESS! *wink*

I’m just going to overview a few things going on in my life right now. Just to catch up with me. Maybe I just have been so busy that I need to see it in print to even put into context everything that’s been going on. This may seem like boasting but I’m a little excited about this so I want to share. Some of you may or may not know that the hb does some acting. He has done several small independent films and some voice over work.  He is currently working on a Western called ‘Longshot’ and has written a majority of the screen play as well.  Well, they pulled some major strings and got David Carradine *(Kill Bill) to fly in to be in the movie with Jim. We are filming this weekend and I will be doing still photography so I should have some pics soon. I know that may be small beans to some but for us it’s pretty exciting. I’m excited for Jim and the all the work he has put into this. Then seeing it all work out for him.  It sure does shake up redundancy. I guess this goes hand in hand with our completely unconventional life.

And I want to mention Bridal sessions. I have a love/hate relationship with bridal sessions. I love them because I get to spend another day with my bride getting to know her and do what i like doing best: shooting.  I love that she gets to do a run through of how the dress fits and what needs altered, to get her hair done to see how it will look – in essence, a great run through so that the wedding day is comfortable and preparations are perfect. That’s a plus. Many times we have determined hairstyles aren’t exactly what she had envisioned and the alterations for the dress were quite uncomfortable when in the dress more than 30 minutes. But on the other hand, I get these images and I’m GIDDY to play with them and get them posted but I CAN’T! Because 9 times out of 10 Mr. doesn’t know what she looks like and it’s not my job to blow that for him or her. Especially when brides do some funky, unique and off the wall stuff. I’m just itching to showcase it.  You girls know exactly who I’m talking about! So the photographer in me finds bridals the hardest b/c I am doing cartwheels to show them off!!

 I need an assistant. I haven’t been able to update my website in FOREVER!!  I am putting feelers out there for a part time assistant.  I need someone to help me with various tasks on the computer and to help shoot as well. I am going to compile a list of what I need and will post that soon. Examples of what I need without a detailed list:  editing/ website updates/ marketing/ data entry.. shooting at weddings. Send me an email.

Had a fun girls weekend in Myrtle Beach this past weekend.  5 female photographers all got together and did some boudoirs. We stayed in a pretty posh place on the 23rd floor,  that my friends is pretty high UP! That could be my fear of heights talking though.. I just tried not to look out too often. You know you’re in trouble when riding the elevator to your room, your ears start popping. You might be afraid of heights IF…

Ok, anyway.  

We played with light. Did some really cool double exposure type shots that Stacy took, so I don’t have them on here but they are on my facebook page under my tagged photos. Cool stuff. We must be nerds. Self acclaimed.  And since I just got my Nikon they coerced me into just using my Nikon and learning it. And I didn’t do too bad of a job. 

And I have a great bridal session I’d love to share but can’t.  I also have a couple engagement sessions and a few more boudoir so I’ll be back. To ramble on and on…….

Until next time

xoxoxo

LOFT NOIRE. Which essentially means ‘The Black Loft’. I deliberated a name for a while and kept coming back to it. I like how mysterious and sexy it sounds. It kind of just rolls off the tongue. And really nothing is sexier than the french language. So Voila. ahem. I couldn’t help throwing that one in there… sorry, I got on a roll. Oh yeah, the studio is black so there is the rhyme to the reason.

And while most of my brides end up buying a package for the mister, it is an entirely separate entity.

I am still running a ‘pay the rent special’ until March 31st. Packages are half off until midnight, that’s the stroke of twelve am folks. If you lock in the rate, we can schedule the session anytime. I need to pay the rent peeps but I can’t give away my services eternally. I gotta feed the chil-ren too.  So send me an email if you are interested.

I am not going to post anymore images on this blog as it is offensive to those stuffy people that can’t see beyond bra straps..which is one reason I decided to separate myself as a wedding photographer and a boudoir artist. Some folks never see beyond the skin. Believe me kids, it’s just easier this way. 

The secret is thisclose to being fully released.

Here is a sample album of the secret.

*boudoirs* shhhhh, it’s our secret… people get really uptight about these sometimes (there is always a church lady that never really got over her inhibitions– that will always make some stink about it, and not so much because she thinks it’s scandalous, but because she don’t have the courage to do it herself!)  so I gotta keep this under somewhat wraps and have more info shortly to be announced. We don’t need her chasing you around town with the revelations. 

 I have to admit. I find boudoirs the MOST gratifying of all the work I do.  Women deal with issues consistently on how to be beautiful, maintain beautiful and compete with models on the covers of magazines and in videos. I love when a woman comes to me….. Instantly. They ARE that model. They ARE beautiful. There are no boundaries. That is liberating. There is no better time than right now to be that woman you think is beautiful. That he finds so sexy and beautiful.  There is no reason to worry about that extra 5 lbs. There is always going to be an excuse – before you know it, time has passed you by. Don’t be one of those that procrastinated your thoughts away!

Because of my intro and getting my new space. I need to pay rent. That means a deal for you! 

Half off my session rates until March 31st.  Lock in the rate and pay now to book after March 31st.  That means 250 for 3 changes and 2.5 hours in the studio.  That! Is an AMAZING rate!! Since I’ve put the word out on Facebook,  all my weekends are booked until August. I still have weekday slots available.  [You can do them after work on a weekday as well!] No sweat.

You take care of yourself. You take vitamins. You go to the gym. You eat right and spend money on beauty treatments, hair and spa. You spend time doing your hair and make up. You buy the clothes that make you feel beautiful.  You should be the beauty you intended to be. Capture you in your essence.  You already spend money on yourself as you are that independent woman that doesn’t need to have an excuse to do something for yourself. He will love it. You will feel amazing about yourself and about the results. The letters I’ve received from the women that have modeled sessions have brought me to tears. Giving them that freeing gift of being beautiful and over the fearfulness of flaws and weight- no longer restricting them.. is an amazing experience for us both. As women.

 Forever. Beautiful. That is highly gratifying as an artist and rewarding to you, the client for eternally being beautiful. 

I am putting together a sample album for you to view. All of my package sessions include an album. This is an example of some of the pages.  Put yourself in the place of Miss S. She’s classy. She’s beautiful. She’s now timeless.  She’s You!                   Enjoy