Stress-Free Posing: Standing Edition

Posing can be a stressful task. You have a million things going through your mind during a photoshoot: light, camera settings, interacting with the client. Then you have to come up with interesting and flattering poses for each and every shot! Yikes!

Or, posing can be easy. True story! You don’t have to stress. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to memorize a million poses. You don’t even have to change things up that much to get variety!

The key to stress free posing is to make small adjustments in order to get a LOT of variety from one simple setup. Yep, it’s that easy. Tweak things a little, engage the couple, get them to interact, and get some great expressions. Then tweak again, and repeat. You’ll get a ton of variety, without having to worry about thinking up a completely different pose for each shot.

Today we’re going to look how to use this idea with standing poses and a couple. Standing works in pretty much every situation, is comfortable, and has roughly a billion different setups possible, so it’s a great place to start!

Eventually you’ll put together different simple setups like standing, sitting, and lying down. Then you’ll get mega variety!

First, the most basic setup: standing side by side, holding hands, facing their bodies to the camera, looking at the camera.

From there, we just make small adjustments to get variety! Like, create more distance between them.

Or, change up where they’re looking. So she could look at the camera, and he could look at her. He could look at the camera, and she could look at him. Or, bonus! They could look at each other! These are quick and easy adjustments that can give a totally different feel to the image.

Also note the variety you can get when you change up how they hold onto each other. There are tons of options when it comes to hands! Hold hands, her hands around his arm, his arms around her, her arms around him, etc.

You can also change up the way their bodies are facing, which really changes the look of the pose. So, they can also face their bodies towards each other, and then look at the camera. This one is awesome because it’s very slimming!

And they can look at each other.

Within that pose you can change up how their hands are placed.

And where they look. Here they’re both looking off-camera, in the direction of each other, giving a really comfortable, content feel to the image. Bonus points if you can throw a rainbow in there.

You can also add in some smooching. He can give her a kiss on the cheek (and vice versa)

Then go in for the full smooch.

He can stand behind her, both looking at the camera.

Or not looking at the camera!

You may have noticed there that by simply changing your distance to the subject, and the angle that you’re shooting at, you increase the variety of images without even changing the pose!

So you could have them look at each other again, but this time get in nice and tight, focusing just on their faces.

Then have her stand behind him, just to change it up y’know.

And hey, while she’s there, why not go for the always adorable piggy back ride.

With standing you can also add in movement! Fun! He can lift her up and go for a smooch (or not)

And we’ll wrap it up with one of my favs, holding hands and spinning around!

Whew! See, in practically no time at all, you have a bunch of different poses, and all you’ve done is have your couple stand up! And there are many more poses you could come up with that are variations on these ones here. Simply change up how they face each other, where they look, how they hold onto each other, and how they stand together, and the possibilities are incredible.

Best of all, it takes very little mental energy to just make slight adjustments. By the end you’ll have variety, but you didn’t have to work too hard to get there! That let’s you focus on chatting with them, making them feel comfortable, and encouraging them to engage with each other. The goal is that while they’re in these poses, they’ll have great, natural expressions!

Tips

• Change where they look
• Change how they stand (beside, facing, one behind the other)
• Change how they hold on to each other
• Change your distance and angle
• Add in action and movement
• Add in smooches

Do you have any more tips for standing poses? Share them in the comments below!