Photographic Tutorial – Posing a model

The number one request I get for my videos is on the subject of posing the model. I covered that pretty well on this video but there is so much more to it than what is on this video. The main thing is to make the model feel comfortable and to capture who she is. I usually have the model do her own poses for the first few minutes of every look I shoot. This way I am sure to get the “real” person who is in front of me. By the time I start giving her poses that I’ve learned from shooting other models, I’m not sure whether we are shooting this model, or the model that I learned the poses from. We are taking good pictures for sure…but are we capturing the model that is standing in front of the camera, or are we creating a new person instead?

It’s not necessarily wrong to create a new person since so much of photography is about creating an idealized, perfect view of things. But if I’m going to do that, I also like to make sure that I’ve also photographed the person standing in front of me as well. For that reason, I always spend some time shooting the model doing her own poses -even if she doesn’t know how to pose properly.