Marco Ibanez Interview

“I realized I could create something similar to what I considered to be the most beautiful expression of art that I knew. And I fell in love with that.”

This week, I had the honor of sitting down with Marco Ibanez- a world renowned boudoir photographer, mentor, and educator. Marco’s studio is located in Maryland where he has ran his business for the past six years. Although he worked in corporate finance, which is very analytical, he explains that he always had a creative side. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed painting, photography, and music but only considered them to be hobbies. Marco goes on to explain, “I never paid much attention to it. But a few years ago, one of my good friends died all of a sudden from a heart attack. He made me think about my life and the things that I was doing. I realized that I wasn’t doing a lot of the things that I really enjoyed doing. So I decided to do more of those- do more of the things that made me happy. And that’s how I began to get more into photography.” He turned to boudoir when he saw the impact his work had on his clients lives. “I never saw that when I was working for a company, especially in finance. I worked with numbers, spreadsheets, preparing reports. I never knew who was benefitting from it.” Marco explains, “But in this case, being a boudoir photographer, and showing the photos to my clients I can see how these images really impact their lives in a very positive way.”

Marco’s posing style is very organic and natural-looking. He is able to take something very visual, such as photography, and turn it into an analytical process. While his photos may appear very un-posed and relaxed to the untrained eye, everything he does is very intentional. Every angle has a purpose. Every arch is dramatic, but still creates what appears to be an effortless pose. “That’s how my brain works, I’m very visual” Marco says. In the beginning, the posing course was created for his own personal use during his sessions. As time went on, Marco realized that this could also be a helpful tool for novice photographers, or even seasoned artists who wanted a reliable posing flow for their clients.

“It came organically, I think.” Marco explains, “I worked with a lot of people before I began to charge for boudoir. At the beginning I used to work with a lot of models. That helped me a lot. I would see them in action, and they know what they’re doing. They know what angles work best, this is what they do for a living; so I would watch them pose and ask questions and try to understand why they were doing the things they were doing. Then I began to pick and choose the poses I thought would work with most people, because of course everyone’s different. Everybody has a different body type. So, that’s how I began to create the poses.” Aside from his sessions, Marco is also a well-known educator in the boudoir community. He offers boudoir workshops and mentorships, as well as products such as his posing course and presets. “My goal as a photographer is to impact in a positive way, the lives of my clients, but also the lives of other photographers. And I can do that with boudoir,” Marco says.

Marco’s go-to gear right now is his Canon EOS R and the 50mm f1.4 lens. “You can do great work with very few equipment,” he says, “From a business perspective, you have to use your resources in the most efficient way possible.” This philosophy carries over into the way he practices photography as well. When asked, if he could give himself any advice as a novice photographer, Marco explained, “One of the things I would have done in a different way is that I basically learned everything on my own. Watching YouTube videos, reading books, and stuff like that. More than anything, trial and error- and that’s a great way to learn. However, you’re going to lose a lot of time. And it takes a lot of time to learn everything you need to learn, right? Time is something that is very precious to me specifically. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to save money, it should be the other way. You should spend a lot of money trying to save time. Because time doesn’t come back. Time is gone, and it’s gone. You can always make more money. So if I could go back I would invest a lot more in my education and learn from somebody that knows better than I do. That way I would have been much better sooner, and I would have probably been able to charge and do this professionally a lot sooner than I did. So that would be my advice to people: not to invest in your equipment, but to invest in your education.”

“There is a journey to finding your own style”, Marco says. When he first started out, Marco followed a lot of photographers whose style was considered light and airy. He liked their work so much that he tried to emulate it, making his work also light and airy. But it didn’t feel like him. “Now my style is completely different… I tell people they have to spend some time analyzing themselves. Why do you like the things that you like? There has to be some experiences when you were younger that influenced your life today, right? So that happened to me. I was very influenced by 17th century master painters; I grew up in a neighborhood where all the streets were named after painters. So from a very young age, I had exposure to these painters. So I would look at their images or paintings and I thought they were really beautiful.” Marco continues, “One day I was shooting with someone and when I saw that image on the back of my camera, it reminded me of a Rembrandt painting. That was the first time I realized I could create something similar to what I considered to be the most beautiful expression of art that I knew. And I fell in love with that. So from there, my style began to change into more dramatic, more contrast, more dark.”

When Marco isn’t teaching or holding a camera, he enjoys watching movies with his wife and children, listening to music, and playing the guitar. “I also enjoy being alone. I think I like it more than normal,” Marco laughs, “sometimes I go to my studio and I stay there for a long time just to be alone.” When Marco decided to leave his full-time job to pursue photography, he gives credit to his wife for being his biggest supporter. When he doubted himself, she was the one that encouraged him to leave his job to do what he loved. “I’m much happier. And that is priceless; I can’t put a price on that. I don’t think too many people have the luxury of doing what they love and getting paid for it. Honestly, I think that’s like the unicorn everybody is after. I’m very grateful that I’m able to do that”, Marco says.