Portrait Posing Can Be As Simple or Hard As You Want to Make It.

by | Feb 5, 2022

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

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:

He started by demonstrating how he liked to pose a subject, which was basically setting the height of a posing stool and putting subject in pose A, then he moved them to pose B, then finally to Pose C.

After a few minutes of this demonstration, he asked me to show the class how to pose the model he had been working with and I didn’t remember a darn thing. It was too much detail for my brain to 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.

Here are a few simple posing suggestions that have worked for me over the years and you might want to give a try:

  • 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 more square to the camera to add dynamics to the pose.
  • When the subject is standing in a three-quarter view (to the camera) have your subjects place all of 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 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 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, you’ll just shoot.


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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 new from Amazon for $24.06 or used starting around twenty bucks, as I write this, Kindle version is $22.86 for those who prefer a digital format.