Dynamic Posing Guide: Modern Techniques for Digital Photographers

Introduction

 

Photography is an art, and just like any form of art, it is a medium for expression. How well photographs create an expression or tell a story depends on how well that expression is communicated. Photography is essentially a means of visual communication. Cameras are used for anything from documentation to creating imaginative forms of art. In this book I focus on the more creative yet tactical form of photographic art through the mechanism of posing.

A lot of photographers have asked me, “My clients and models tell me they don’t want to look posed. How do I work around this?” I answer, “The reason they come to you is because they haven’t yet found a pose in which they look good.” Even professional models are posing. Anything you do with humans is a pose. That’s just a fact. Your goal as a professional photographer is to create a dynamic and expressive pose that makes your models look good in the final image, and thus look “not posed!” That is the goal of this book.

It might seem like I am the master at stating the obvious, but there is a method to this madness and actual theory and reasoning behind why we pose. Paraphrasing the dictionary, the definition of “to pose” is to assume a particular attitude or stance, especially with the hope of impressing others or to assume or hold a physical attitude for an artistic purpose. For the purposes of this book, I am going to hold to the definition of the later, “to assume or hold a physical attitude for an artistic purpose.” ...