Our workshop last Wednesday (August 27, 2014) was focused on how to pose people and communicate with your model. I selected a young girl to model for us who has not had any prior experience modeling for photographers. Some photographers work with models all the time, but many do not. Our everyday photographers are usually photographing family and friends so I thought it would be a good idea to practice how to work with inexperienced people to get interesting photos.
Choosing the subject of your photo is the easiest part of the process, but one should also consider what’s going on in the background and also what the subject is doing. A photographer should always tell a story with each photo. For our workshop, we brought several props for our model to use just to have something for her hands to use. Without props it is often awkward for the model to know what to do with her hands. We tried several different props but I think what worked best in this particular case was the cell phone. In another photo I gave our model a scarf to play with although you don’t actually see the scarf in the photo, it just provided something to move her arms out to make the photo more interesting.
For these kinds of photos it is always a good idea to keep various props around in the studio to try out. Â Sometimes you may want to see the prop in the final result and sometimes it may not be visible. The idea is just to get the inexperienced model to be distracted from the camera and photographer so that the pose is a little more natural looking.
