My Sunday Series on outdoor portraiture continues today with this portrait of Shea. I’ve written four books on the subject of portrait and glamour photography, including one on Available Light Glamour Photography that nicely fits this series of posts.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the beast!—Carl Denham, King Kong, 1933
Once upon a time, I attended a photography workshop on portrait posing featuring a well-respected photographer who was renown for his classic portraiture. The class went went something like this:
After the few minutes of his presentation demonstrating his posing technique, he asked me to show the class how to pose the model he was been working with. I didn’t remember a darn thing. It seemed like his posing demonstration went into more detail than my brain could handle, so I won’t burden you with too much detail either.
If few portrait subjects are perfect, no single pose if perfect either! That means compromises are inevitable and any “rules” you hear from me or anybody else should be considered suggestions to get you started. Posing is really is an art because it combines reality with what you and your subject can accomplish on any given day. Remember: A portrait is an image of a person who knows they are being photographed.
A Few Suggestions
Here are a few simple posing suggestions that have worked for me over the years and you might want to give a try or not. As always, it’s your call:
- Don’t pose plus-sized subjects square to the camera. Besides lacking dynamics, this kind of pose just makes a person look bigger. On the other hand, you can easily pose slender subjects, like Shea, more square to the camera to add some dynamics to the pose.
- When the subject is standing in a three-quarter view (to the camera) pose, have them place all their weight on the foot/leg that’s farthest away from the camera. This should put them in a relaxed position but it doesn’t always because they may not relax in the studio environment. Outdoors it’s different…
- Posing is easier in outdoors (as in the image at right) because your subject is in a more comfortable environment, even if they may not be familiar with that specific location. It’s the sky, clouds, and all that stuff that helps make a subject relax. Plus having objects they can grab, hold onto or lean on, solves one of the perennial posing problems: What to do with a subject’s hands.
As you get more experience, you won’t even think about posing your subjects, you’ll just make photograhs.
Special Note: Every time I feature a portrait of Shea on this blog I get emails from photographers who would like to contact her. I’m sorry but I do not have any of this information. I wish I did and consider myself lucky to have been able to work with her in the past at two different group model shoots.
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The original title of my book Posing for Portrait and Glamour Photography was The ABC’s of Portrait Posing. On this blog there are many posts about posing. Use the Search box in the upper right-hand corner and type “posing” to find appropriate posts. If you want something more lasting, take a look at my book that’s available used from Amazon for $17.47, as I write this, Kindle version is $28.45 for those preferring a digital format.