Intern Hannah: Learning to Pose

I have a little confession for you lovely readers. Learning to pose “real people” can be HARD. When you’re first starting out as a photographer, your tendency (or my tendency, anyway), is just to stick your subjects in front of a bunch of different interesting stuff, instead of doing interesting things with their stance, finding flattering angles, and thinking outside of the box.

So, when Raven challenged us to put our model in one place and try different poses, in that same spot, I had to stretch my creativity and learn to really think through each pose. Like drawing, so much of photography is learning how to see: to pay attention to where your model is holding tension, the position of their limbs, their facial expression, and understand how to fix it.

Posing isn’t just about molding your model into some crazy stance, either. It’s about learning to communicate with the person you’re creating an image of, and getting them to understand what you’re going for. This is why I enjoyed some of the facial modeling we worked on the most; when you’re taking a closeup, you have to help the model feel comfortable and give you an honest/natural expression. It’s all about connection!

I’ve been working hard to bring my “film photographer” mentality to my digital work, especially in regards to posing: work slowly, make each shot count, and most of all, don’t panic! I can’t wait to refine these techniques I’ve learned and apply them to my work. While I know I have a lot more work to do before I can call myself a posing expert, I felt that this workshop really empowered me to try new things and push myself to “be a better poser”.