Posing Clients for Portrait Photographs

Series Summary

Photography is the art of making pictures by exposing film or another medium to a timed flash of light. The basic equipment used for photography includes a digital or mechanical camera equipped with a flash, film or a memory card. Mastering the art of photography is a technical and challenging experience. One has to learn how to focus the lens, control the aperture of the lens, filter the light and understand the importance of the focal length and duration of the exposure. In this free video series on photography, a certified professional photographer discusses a few tips on the art of taking portraits. Get ideas for the best poses for head shots, and find out how important lighting is when taking graduation portraits. Learn to create a makeshift portrait studio using household items, and discover what it takes to start up a digital photography business. Get insider information about the art of portrait photography from a professional in the field.

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about posing clients for portrait photographs. When you're working on good poses for head shots, you first want to check out your subject, and spend some time talking with them, and looking at them, and see what they look like, if you want to capture who they are. Part of that comes with, as you look, is one eye smaller than the other? If that's the case, you want to have the smaller eye closer to the camera, and just different things. For example, on our beautiful model Emily here, if you look at her part, you want to shoot your light into the part of the head. That's always one thing that makes a shot look a little better, and then also, if a person is thinner, or fatter, you want to decide, whether you want to broad light, or short light them, so since Emily is so trim here, we want to give her a broad light, so we're going to turn her just a little bit to the camera, and instead of just having the, we've all seen the tin soldier pose, that everybody gets. You want to turn the body a little bit closer to the camera, you want to shift shoulders just a little bit, just kind of shift down on one of your hips there. Put your foot up on the box, Emily. There you go, and you see how the shoulders change, the head changed. If you tilt the head one way or the other, Emily, tilt your head a little bit to the right. That gives you one look. A little bit to the left, gives you another. Turning the face a little bit closer to the camera, gives you another, and changing where your light is, so we're going to take the light, and we're working with a very large soft box here, and a larger light gives you a softer wraparound, and since we're working with just one light in this, because we're trying to keep things very simple, we have a nice big soft box here, and as we bring the soft box closer, the light gets brighter on one side, and a little bit darker on the other, and if you look right now, if Emily turns her head a little bit to the right, and tilts just a little bit, you can see that the broad face, the bigger portion of her face is lit. That makes a thin person look a little bit more full, and give them some life to their face. If this was a heavyset person, and you lit that broad side of the face, you'd make them actually look larger, so the idea is, you want to have a nice solid light here, you want to have the light up above the eyes, so that there's a little catch light in the eyes, and then it wraps around to a nice shadow."