Let’s face it. Most of our clients aren’t models and most of them probably have little to no modeling experience… except maybe that time they were in 4th grade and practiced their cat walk in their bedroom… am I the only one that did this? It’s your job as the photographer to make them feel comfortable, and it’s your job to make them look like models! Posing is a very advanced technique; it took me 2 years to learn how to pose! Today I’m sharing 5 tips to keep you from blanking at your next session! Let this information really sink in and go out and practice this weekend!

1. Find the best light!
This is first and foremost what you need to pay attention to. Without good light, no amount of posing or editing will make the photo good. Good light is EVERYWHERE. It’s your job to know how to find it! For me, backlighting is always the best. For others, front lighting may be the best. Know your style, and know what light looks best with your style.

Once you’ve established where the best light is, don’t move! This alone was my biggest problem. I would be photographing a couple in great light, but then I would blank on posing, so to kill the time, we would move to a different location. And guess what? The second location was never as good as the first. Don’t move once you have found good light! You are not guaranteed that you will be able to find good light in the next location, so if you’ve already found it, use it!

2. Create interaction
This can mean interaction between the couple and camera, interaction between the couple, and even interaction between the couple and the environment! To help you understand this, imagine if the couple was looking at the camera in every photo.  As you scroll through the photos, they become very similar. So right off the bat, make sure the couple isn’t looking at the camera in every photo! Instead, have them look at each other! This will automatically create a more authentic moment.

Next, you could use the environment to create interaction. “Climb that amazing tree over there! Roll around in the super tall grass! Dip your feet in the ocean!” Those are all actions that create interaction with the environment. If you don’t have a lot of environment to base your actions around, give the couple specific actions that will allow them to interact with each other. This could literally be as simple as looking into each others eyes, nuzzling, or even walking towards you! Try tickling, whispering in each other’s ears, bumping into each other when they walk! The list is endless! Experiment with different actions to find out what is most comfortable for you and your clients!

3. Move their hands!
Now that you’ve got the nuzzling down, what about their arms and hands? They’re just dangling there and it looks so awkward, right? Probably. And it definitely feels even more awkward for your couple. There are hundreds of variations for posing. I like to think of their arms and hands as a “sub-pose”. You have your main pose, let’s say it’s the couple standing, facing each other, foreheads touching. And then you have your “sub-pose”, which is moving their arms and hands into a more natural position. You can stay in the same pose for 10 minutes and just rearrange their hands and you’ll have a wide variety of posing!

For example, let’s say you’re at a shoot and you just blanked. You can’t remember any poses or any actions (ugh this is the worst though). Keep them in the same pose. Don’t move them, just use their hands to create a new pose! You have them in their main pose, so now, have the groom put his hands in his pockets and have the bride wrap her hands around his neck. Still blanking? Have the groom warp his arms around her waist, and have the bride use one hand to guide him in for a kiss. All we’re doing is moving their hands! We aren’t changing the actual pose! So next time you blank, just change their hand position!

4. TALK!
Silence is a mood killer! It’s the biggest of biggest mood killers. When you’re posing them, you’re obviously talking to them, but how about when you’re taking the photos? Are you still talking? You should be. Because silence is the number one way to make your couple think they’re doing something wrong. This was also really difficult for me to grasp. I’m a huge introvert, but when it comes to my clients, I highly doubt they would ever think that I’m anything but the most extroverted person on the planet! I’m CONSTANTLY talking to them! But it didn’t use to be that way. I had to work really hard to step out of my comfort zone and talk to my couples behind the camera.

This was my “before” process: “Okay, umm… let’s start over here. Okay… umm… now face each other and hold hands. Perfect stay right there… (click, click click). Okay now, umm… wrap your hands around her waist (click, click, click).” Sound familiar? Yea. This is what was killing my photo sessions. What I’ve learned to do is to talk behind my camera. I rarely remove the camera from my face, which also means I need to talk a bit louder. If you don’t know what to say to them, just drown them with encouragement. I mean it. Drown them with encouragement. They will love it, and as a result, feel more confident.

Here is my “now” process: “Kaite and Dallas, face each other and snuggle up! Get reeeeally close! Perfect!! Dallas guide her in for a VERY passionate kiss! Kaite, make him work for it, lean back, lean back, lean back! BEAUTIFUL! Oh that was SO great you guys!” This is what every sentence sounds like. Lots of excitement, lots of encouragement, no silence. What this does is not only enforces their cute behavior, it also gives them less time to think about their own hand positions. When they’re not thinking about if it’s right or wrong, they just do what’s comfortable.

So, always be talking, always be encouraging. It will take you a LOT of practice to be comfortable acting like a goofball, especially if you’re introverted. So I suggest taking your best friends out to the middle of nowhere, and start practicing. They will NOT judge you for acting weird, they will not judge you for messing up and having to slow down a bit. They want to help you succeed. Practice makes perfect.

5. Look at their feet!
This is my secret trick for posing. Instead of memorizing tons of different poses, group the poses into categories! This will save you a lot of headache. Look at their feet. Which direction are they facing? Are they facing each other? Are they both facing you? Is one person facing you and the other facing their partner? There are lots of different feet positions, so start out by memorizing some basic ones.

When you’re at a session, and you ask the couple to face each other, don’t take one picture and then ask them to both face you, and then ask them to face each other again!  That will end up wasting you time, and it’s more likely to cause you to blank! Instead, ask them to face each other and don’t move them until you’ve gone through several “sub-poses”! Now, if you blank on sub-poses, THEN move their feet into a different pose (such as both facing you). It’s much easier to remember which poses you’ve done and which you haven’t by grouping the poses into different feet categories.

Study other photographer’s photos. Pay attention to which direction their feet are facing and memorize that and not the entire pose! This will not only help your posing transitions be smoother, but it will also help you add your own creative uniqueness to the pose by giving you the freedom to pose their hands however you want. Notice in the first image below, Jackie and Cory are facing each other, and in the second image, Cory is facing me, and Jackie is facing him!

These are the 5 tips to keep you from blanking that I had to work really hard at in order to make my clients more comfortable in front of the camera! It took me two years to learn these secrets and I learned most of them by trial and error. I truly hope these tips will help you get through those awkward sessions where you just completely blank! Just remember to keep talking and encouraging and the rest will start to fall into place! Leave your comments below for next weeks topic and “like” Bailey Elle Photography on Facebook for more updates!