Photography For Beginners - How to Pose Your Model

One of the most difficult areas in portrait photography is posing. What do you get your subject to do? I found this one of the most difficult skills to grasp at first and so do many novice photographers. But this is a skill just like many other areas in photography and can be easily learned. And the best thing is, you can teach yourself; so read on.

With posing, you need to be able to relate to your subject, their features, flattering lighting, clothing as well as poses. This will all come with time and practice but you need a starting point. A great way to start is to get some posing ideas together, as many as you can, and practice on friends and family. Discover what works and what doesn't. Identify what different features demand in terms of poses; file these away for future reference. I find the following method useful for teaching yourself portrait photography and posing; collecting poses.

Go to your local newsagent and buy a visual diary or something similar. Get a big one; you want to be able to file many ideas. Next, browse magazines and buy ones where you find poses that interest you and want to emulate. Browse the internet for similar material, print it off and post in your dairy. Browse books, newspapers and any other sources you wish and keep posting to your visual diary.

Once you have enough material to keep yourself busy, start analyzing the photos. What you need to know besides the pose is lighting. Identify how many lights were used and from what direction. Write this down next to the photograph. Also write down the names of people you think this particular pose would suit.

Now you have your ideas on how to pose and light your subject. Bring friends/family in one by one and try the poses in your visual diary. Open the diary to the page of a selected pose you are attempting; put the diary down in front of your camera so you can view it while still able to observe your subject. Make any additional notes with issues that come up so you know what to do next time you shoot this pose. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat until you're happy with a good selection of poses. You should be now competent and confident to slowly move on to paying clients.

Still bring your diary out when you have a paying client; put it where you can constantly refer to it; change poses to suit or modify ones that show promise. Make notes if you need to, nothing wrong with doing this with a client present. Some clients actually like to look through a collection of poses and choose something that strikes them, so there are two benefits to maintaining your diary.

When you have used this method over and over you will probably end up not requiring the use of your pose file. But still maintain it, you will always find it useful as there is an infinite variety of poses, particularity when altering lighting to change the mood.

A reputable online photography course would provide training in how to pose your model and many other aspects of photography for beginners as well.