Want to be a portrait photographer?
Want to be a great portrait photography and earn a living at the same time? This specialist area of photography is huge, but also hugely competitive. You really need to learn what is required to make great portraits. The good news is that this is a skill anyone can acquire and there will always be mountains of work available.
One of most difficult areas of portrait photography is posing. What do I get my client to do? I found this one of the most difficult skills to grasp and so do many novice photographers. But, as I have mentioned in other posts, this is a skill like many other areas in photography and can be easily learned.
With posing, you need to be able to relate to your client, their features, flattering lighting, clothing and poses. A great way to start is to get some posing ideas together, as many as you can, and practice on friends. Discover what works and what doesn’t. Identify what different features demand in terms of poses, file these away for future reference. keep a folder of poses that you like and know work. Bring this out when you have a paying client; put in somewhere so you can constantly refer to it, change poses to suit or modify ones that show promise. When you have done this hundreds of times you will probably end up not requiring the use of your pose file. But still maintain it, you will always find it useful as there is an infinite variety of poses.
To get you started on posing techniques, have a look at the following course on posing secrets. Sure, they’re not really secrets but you need resources from somewhere to get started.
Click here to learn how to pose your models
