Picture Perfect : Voluptuous Valentine Portraits Hot Item for Beaus Stuck in Gulf

Before war broke out, Navy corpsman Kristen Woodman had heard of boudoir photography, but hadn’t thought of herself as a potential pin-up.

Then, with just a few weeks to go before Valentine’s Day, the 21-year-old learned her boyfriend, also a Navy corpsman, would soon be deployed to Saudi Arabia. For Woodman, that was the push she needed: This week, she donned sexy lingerie and gloves, put on a little extra makeup and posed seductively for a San Diego photographer.

“It’s not your everyday gift, you know. It’s more personal than a card and candy,” said Woodman, whose boyfriend, Navy corpsman Ben Garcia, reports to the Twentynine Palms-based 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade on Monday. “It’s kind of like the ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ thing. And I would much prefer him looking at me than someone else in a magazine.”

Eager to make this Feb. 14 memorable for their husbands and boyfriends overseas, scores of women from around the region have done the same thing recently. Throughout Southern California, but particularly in communities near Navy and Marine bases, photographers who shoot “intimate portraits” for a living are reporting a surge in military-related business--in some cases, women who are about to be deployed themselves.

Barbara Steinberg, who photographed Woodman, says the Valentine’s Day rush began in early January as women tried to beat the weeks-long delay in mail service to the Persian Gulf. But other photographers say their calendars have been full ever since Operation Desert Shield began.

“When they first started shipping out we got a real flurry, and then a certain amount this Christmas,” said Karina Winder-Cortopassi, who runs Karina Photographers, a boudoir studio in Irvine, near the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. “Now we’re getting people . . . ordering more to send their honeys as valentines.”

Since fighting has broken out in the Persian Gulf, at least one photographer reports he is meeting a different kind of clientele: enlisted women posing for themselves--and for posterity.

“We’re getting some women who are in the military and just got their marching orders. They come roaring in because it might be the last time anyone ever will see their body,” said Beverly Hills photographer Miles Patrick, who calls these clients ‘women who have heard the bell toll.’ ”

Patrick says he and his wife, Sandy, have had recent photo sessions with several nurses who expected to be deployed, as well as one Air Force cadet whose mother accompanied her to her appointment.

“They were quite emotional about the whole deal. This girl was going to be in a risky spot,” Patrick said, explaining that this type of client is seeking to create a historical record of her body at its best. “They say, ‘Here it is, that’s what God gave me, and this might be the last documentary proof that I was here.’ ”

Asked to define their craft, boudoir photographers, most of whose photo packages cost $150 and up, say it depends on the client. Some go for kittenish poses, complete with frilly underwear and props like fans, parasols and feather boas. Others, like many of the women Patrick calls his “morbid” clients, prefer artistic nudes.

Some military wives pose in their husbands’ uniforms, combining dress blues or camouflage with a pair of spike heels. Other women have been known to bring along the family dog.

The resulting images are “kind of like a fantasy,” explained a blond woman who sat at a hairstyling table at Elliot Photography in Hollywood this week, preparing for her boudoir session. Like most boudoir clients, the 21-year-old nursing student was posing as a gift for her beau--an Air Force pilot, she said, who is due to be deployed any day.

For her, as for the majority of military clients in search of the perfect Valentine’s Day present, how steamy the photos could be was dictated in part by where they were going to be sent.

If your beau is on a ship in the gulf, nudity is no problem--the mail that arrives there is not subject to Saudi censorship. But, if he is stationed in the Saudi Arabian desert, a photo that exposes even knees and forearms can earn an obscene rating and be returned to sender.

In response to such restrictions, some boudoir customers are supplementing their sessions with “glamour” portraits, which focus on the head and shoulders. Winder-Cortopassi calls them “mommy shots,” because they show a demure side even a mother could love.

Suzi, a 30-year-old data entry technician in San Diego, selected only the tamest exposures to send to her boyfriend, Navy Chief Petty Officer Michael Tebbetts. She knows she could have sent even the most revealing poses, since Tebbetts, a San Diego native who is based in Virginia, is now stationed on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

“But I wasn’t comfortable sending anything bare-breasted because I wasn’t sure who would be opening the mail,” she said. Instead, she’s using her written descriptions of the racier shots as an incentive to lure Tebbetts home. “I thought it would be a good reminder of what he might have to come home to.”

Suzi, who talked to The Times on the condition that her last name not be used, is thrilled with her “mildly risque” photographs, which she thinks will come as a big surprise to Tebbetts. She says they depict a more adventurous woman than the one he left behind.

“I’m a little bit more modest in person because I don’t have all the lighting and shadows to help me out,” she said. “I’ve never thought of myself as taking a good picture. I looked at (the photos) and said, ‘My God, is that me? What happened to all that fat?’ ”

Still, Suzi said she would not have posed for the photos if Tebbetts had not been deployed. The distance, and the melancholy tone of his letters, changed her mind.

“In his letters he lets me know how much he misses me,” she said. “There’s very few things you can send over there that they can really appreciate. Beyond letters, photographs are the only thing that they have. It’s a piece of home.”

Shelly, whose husband was deployed to Saudi Arabia from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in August, agreed.

“I think a lot of women wouldn’t normally do this,” said the 22-year-old, who works in an Orange County photography studio but had never planned to become a client. “It’s very unlike me. But under the situation . . . it’s a boost to morale, so to speak. It’s better than a crossword puzzle.”

Shelly, who also requested anonymity, hid her photos in the bottom of her husband’s luggage last summer--and she hid them so well, they not only surprised him, but they also got past the censors. Her secret: she doctored a photo album, slipping the scantily clad shots behind more wholesome family portraits.

“He said he loved them,” Shelly said, remembering the first letter she received from the front, in which he admitted he had pinned them up on the wall. Later, when she went to a support group of military wives, she heard about the photos from her friends.

“I just about died. Women at our group meeting said, ‘My husband saw your pictures. He wants me to get them done,’ ” Shelly said, adding that any woman who thinks her husband will keep the photos to himself is dead wrong. “They want to show them off. I guess they’re really proud.”

“It’s kind of a given,” Woodman, the San Diego-based Navy corpsman, said a few hours after her boudoir session. “Men like to look at women in lingerie. Everybody knows this, whether they admit it or not. . . . I don’t think of it as pornography. I enjoyed myself today, and if he gets some enjoyment out of it, too, that’s great.”

Liz Lang, a 39-year-old former Navy Seabee, shared Woodman’s outlook. Lang, whose husband, Petty Officer 1st Class J. Lee Lang, is on call to leave any minute, intended to give her boudoir photos as a valentine. But fear of his departure made her change plans.

“I don’t know when this phone call is going to come. I couldn’t wait,” she said, explaining that in August, a last-minute call announced that he was headed for the Gulf. He stayed 33 days and returned.

Now, as the 38-year-old Navy steelworker awaits his orders, he says he is enjoying what he calls the “very sensual pictures.” The one of his wife wrapped in a mint green feather boa sits next to the bed in an antique frame. But most are kept hidden in a drawer, including one in which, “for a giggle,” his wife donned the protective leather gloves and safety glasses he wears at work--and little else.

Only one is on public display: the fur coat shot now sits atop a bookshelf in the living room, but Lee Lang has plans to put it on his desk at work, “So I can admire the beauty every day.”

Since he has already been to Saudi Arabia once, Lee Lang said he felt qualified to speculate what impact such photos might have on the troops overseas.

“If they got something like this, it could get some guys down” because they’d see what they were missing, he said. “But it would definitely bring my morale up if I were to get pictures like this. It definitely did.”