How to Get the Best Poses Out of Men with Vanessa Joy
When you work as a photographer, you’re often dealing with subjects who aren’t professional models. This puts more responsibility on you to coax best poses out of the subject. Today, I’d like to give you some useful tips for doing this when your subject is a man, or someone who wants to portray a masculine image. There are a variety of ways to combine body positioning, lens choice and angles to make your subject appear more masculine. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Posing Basics
First, I’d like to talk about the basic positions your subjects can pose in and how to tailor those to men. Although these are natural positions people use every day, they can present some challenges in a photography setting. The biggest challenge comes when working with people who have no modeling experience. When people are asked to pose for a photograph, they often take a very unnatural stance, as if the pressure made them forget how to sit, stand or lean. Providing them with some guidance can help here.
Standing Poses
For standing poses, you want to start from the bottom. The feet are the foundation of the standing pose and if the feet aren’t right, nothing else will be. I like to tell men to pretend they are riding a skateboard towards me. The stance provides a nice foundation, and it’s an easy pose for them to assume. From there, they should point their front foot slightly towards the camera and stick their chest out towards the main light. A nice wide chest brings out the masculinity and exudes confidence and power.
A common point of confusion in standing poses is what to do with the thumbs. Should they be in the pocket or out of the pocket? There may be some obscure reason to choose one over the other, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. In this instance, having the subject do whatever is most comfortable to them will work fine and aid you in getting a pose that doesn’t look artificial.
