I just finished writing a magazine article for the US magazine, Professional Photographer on fashion posing, and am also writing an article for a Chinese magazine on weddings!
For the US article, they asked me to talk about breaking the rules of posing, and creating images where people don’t look stiff. That article and magazine will be coming out in a couple months, and gets mailed to all professional photographers automatically. It will also be on newsstands and I’ll let you all know when my issue is out for anyone else who wants to pick it up.
The biggest thing about a fun style of posing is making people look great, while at the same time making people look comfortable, natural, and real. Care has to be taken on every detail, but the look is that things happened naturally.
The reason this is a hot topic, is because most photographers don’t understand posing, but want to create fun images. However, just breaking the rules for the sake of breaking them (while not understanding them) really means awkward images where people don’t look their best, and many times even look heavy. These photographers then cover the image over with computer effects so that the image looks fun or funky, but yet the person still looks awkward.
Creating sub-par images and masking them with computer effects should never be the result of a professional photographer. Every portrait session should be about making people look amazing, no excuses! And it should be done in the camera and not the computer.
This means then, understanding classic posing very well, and being aware of every detail in an image, but also being able to back off and let someone’s personality come into the pose for a spectacular, unique, and creative look.
For this article, I wanted some amazing images to go along with it, and chose some of these fashion images of Liz, because each of the poses from her photo shoot were spectacular, different, sexy, and showed her personality.
I turned in some other images as well, and we’ll all just have to wait and see how the article gets laid out in its final form.
The Chinese magazine asked me to talk about how weddings are photographed here in America. Weddings are not only different in our two countries, but they are photographed completely differently. My article for them, will hopefully give insight and ideas to Chinese photographers as well as satisfy curiosity. I talk about equipment, approach, and reasons things are done as they are here, compared to how they are done there.
This article will be published in the same month as the US article, but will only be available in China. The entire article will be translated and written in Chinese too, so I won’t even be able to read the copy they send me. I just hope the concepts translate as I hope.
To see more of my images, browse my website at BryCox.com.