Pamela Jean (with her daughter Whitney) demonstrates basic posing techniques for photographing women, concentrating on standing leg and arm positions to create flattering images. Core guidance: always begin posing from the base (feet/legs) and build upward; favor bending the leg closest to the camera (front knee) and twisting hips away from the camera to slim the silhouette; exceptions exist (e.g., keep the front leg straight and bend the back leg when doing an over-the-shoulder look). The video also covers upper-body and arm options (hands on hips, folded arms with breathing room, hands in pockets, behind the back) and recommends mixing leg and arm positions to create many pose variations.
Chapters
Hello, my name is Pamela, and I'm here with my daughter Whitney. She and I are going to teach you and demonstrate some basic posing for women. So let's go ahead and get started. Whit. So, first of all, when you're posing women, any pose, whether it's a guy or a girl for that matter, you always want to start at the base. You never want to start at the top. You want to start at the base. It's like building a foundation of a house. You want to start at the bottom and work your way up the body. So even if you're not showing the bottom half, you should always have that as your beginning. For your pose is to start at the beginning. So we are going to have Whitney point your toes to your left, and you're going to bend the front knee, pop the hip away from the camera. Whatever is closest to the camera is going to appear larger. And for the most part, there is not a female on the planet that would like anything that's below the waist to look larger in a picture. So she's going to swing her hips away from the camera, bending that front knee almost always. Almost always the front knee. The leg closest to the camera is going to be bent. So we're going to bend the knee. We're going to bring the hands to the hips, arching the back right in here, keeping it nice and tight. The torso is always tight as well. And. And then we're going to turn the shoulders just a little bit. Perfect. Now, if I were photographing Whitney in a picture right here, I would always tell her things like, keep your core tight. Most females in their photographs don't want their tummies to look big, so just tell them to keep their core tight. Tighten up the tummy, tighten up the core. That helps alleviate that problem. Now, I'm going to have Whitney keep her upper body exactly as it is. Now switch your legs opposite for me. Okay. So what I want you to notice is look at how much wider she is here in this shot. And now switch back to the way you were as opposed to here. So she went from being one thigh wide here. Go back to where you were to two thighs wide. And again, most women don't want to be two thighs wide, so you're always going to want to keep that front leg back bent. Exactly. And nice and tight. That's perfect. That looks really, really good. So another pose that I want to show you is when that rule is broken, I just told you that the front leg is almost always bent. Well, I'm going to show you a pose that breaks the rules, just so you understand what I was talking about there. So turn your body towards that corner back there. Okay. So we want to do a cute shot of her looking over her shoulder. So bend the front knee on this one. Okay. Now I want to point out we've got the two thighs wide happening here. She is not going to like what that does to her hip line. So what I'm going to have her do is actually keep the front leg straight, which breaks that rule. And you're going to bend the back leg. Exactly. And bring the knee across the body. Perfect. Shift, twist, twist. Good. Now if I were capturing this as an image, I would probably shoot it from about right here and up. She's going to bring her chin far around. Awesome. And then we have the light proper. So we're lighting the mask of the face. Tip the top of the head that direction. Awesome. So we're framing the face beautifully. And look at how tiny she looks here. Now switch. Switch back the legs one more time. Good. And look at how much wider she is here. She is not going to like that at all in a picture. So that's a place where this actually breaks the rules. You can relax with. So what I want you to think about when you're doing posing of women is or posing in general, don't try to have a long list of poses. I want you to think about the lower half as being different leg poses and then the upper body as different upper body poses. So I want to just focus on different leg positions. And then once you establish all of these leg positions and then you have all of the upper body positions, you can mix and match these however you want to and create a long, long list of pose options. You'll have so many options that will fit how perfectly for your subject matter because not everyone can be posed the same. Their body types, their style, their tastes all play a part into how to pose them. So we are going to start with some really, really good, basic leg poses. So, Whitney, I'm going to have you go wide with your feet. Good. Now shift your hips to the left. Good. And then twist your hip away from the camera so your left hip goes towards that corner. Exactly. So. So I want you to notice the difference. Bring your hips back towards the camera. Look at how wide. And she's a tiny girl, but her hips look much wider here. Now twist it away from the camera. Good. Look at how that has created a much slimmer look. It doesn't matter if you have a size 2 or a 0. You don't want to make them look like they're a 6 or 8. If you have a size 8 person, you don't want to make them look like they're a size 12. So whatever size they are, you want to make them that size or even a little bit smaller. I promise you, your female subjects will love that. So twist the hips away. That's perfect. So here's shot number one. We're just concentrating on legs right now. So here's a great leg pose. Now go back straight towards the camera and bring your feet together. And you're going to bend your right knee. Good. Bring it across the body. Twist the hips away with it. Excellent. And bring your thighs closer together. Yes, good. Exactly. And cross that knee over just a little harder. Exactly. Very good. Now bring this hand up so we can see what the hip line is doing. Look at how pretty that is. It complements really, really, really well. So here is another leg pose. Now I'm going to work on another leg pose. This is again one that breaks that rule of having the front knee bent. So what you're going to do is you're going to step forward onto your right foot. And now your back leg. Your left leg is going to come back up on its toe. So all of your weight is pressed forward. Good. This back leg is holding no weight at all. All it's doing is keeping her from tipping over. And look at how pretty and slim she looks right across the legs. Again, we have that one thigh wide again, which is really important photographing women. Okay, relax. And I'm going to show you one more time the back shot of the legs. So point your toes towards that corner. Perfect. Your front leg stays straight, and you're going to bend your left leg and twist your upper body back towards the camera. Exactly. Good. And again, there's another leg pose. So in just a brief amount of time, I showed you several different leg pose options. And this is just. Just standing. So there's so, so many more we can do if we have her sitting or laying or whatever. But we're going to work on standing poses right now. So now let's talk about what to do with the hands and the arms in these pictures. So we can do some mixing and matching of legs and upper body. So turn back towards the camera, and we're just going to work on what to do with the arms. So let's do a real simple leg pose. So turn slightly to your left, bending that front knee. And now go ahead and fold your arms across your chest. However, that's comfortable. Now, a lot of people in doing this will end up pressing their arm to their upper body, which makes the biceps look actually bigger than what they are. And that's another thing women don't really want is their arms to look large. So what you need to remind your client is to give a little breathing room in between your arm and your body. Just don't press the muscle again. Flatten it down. Go ahead and flatten the muscle down so they can see that. And now bring it up a little. Good. You can see the difference there. She's got really good, firm arms, so it's hard to really see the difference. But for most women who don't have the muscle tone that she does, you're going to see a bigger difference there. So here's one arm pose. Now let's go. Hands to the hips. Good. There's another arm pose. Bring your hands together down front. Pull up that right shoulder. Good. There's another pose. Bring the hands behind. There's another pose. Hook your thumbs in your front pockets. If she had front pockets, she could do that. Drop your fingers into your back pockets. Good. So look at all of those other arm options that we had to work with there. So if you think about mixing all of those different arm positions with all of those different leg positions that I showed you, you will have this huge library of options on posing your female subject.
