After a week of reading a photography book and watching a bunch of tutorials online, I got with my little buddy Sam and had her pose for me so that I could practice what I learned. :)
There were a couple of things that I wanted to try out right away. And that was proper posture and foot posing. Here is Sam without instruction.
BAM! There is my girl with some instruction!! Great posture and with her weight on her back foot with the other foot cross over in front. Also her arm is moved off of her arm which shows the true width of her waist and doesn't add her arm to the total width of the picture. This pose really compliments and shows off her great shape! I was super excited when I saw this picture!! I guess the person writing the book I read knew what they were talking about!
Here was more of a candid moment with Tessa that I caught.
Super cute and only slightly posed!
Tessa was outside and gave me an opportunity to try something else that I had read. It said that with children and pets that pictures look better at their level. Here is me shooting Tessa at my level with the lens pointing down...
And Bam! Here I am on Tessa's level!! I think this is one of my favorite kitty pictures ever!! So cute!!!
Ok now back to Sam's photoshoot. There were 4 chapters in my book about posing people's hands correctly... so I really wanted to try it with Sam. Here was one of my first attempts at it. Looking at it, I realized that I had made a couple of errors... first her elbow is the main focus in the picture and has the most light in it.
So I switched to a new angle and liked this picture much more. My lighting was still off though... so it kind of looks like she was blocking her face from the sun haha. I should have faced her in the opposite direction, but oh well... learning experience and the picture still looks pretty good.
This was a my first attempt at posing Sam's hands to play with her hair...
I remembered reading something about posing people's hands with motion. As I was reading it... it didn't really click, but when I was with Sam I got it! Instead of having her pose her hands in her hair (like the picture above), I told her to just run her fingers through her hair... Kyle also assisted by moving the camera into a quicker picture taking mode as well (still need to learn how to operate at DSLR camera.... AND still need to GET a DSLR...) But anyways... posing her hands with motion eventually gave me the two pictures below.
BAM! One of my favorites from the whole shoot!
And then afterwards... BAM! This shot!
I noticed that Sam was giving me a lot "smile for the camera" smiles. I wanted to get a real smile on her face.
I remembered that a trick to doing that was to have people make silly faces. That inbetween the silly faces, people can't help but laugh because they feel silly.
Look at this smile! BAM! I was going for a genuine emotion and not a posed smile.
Silly faces for the win!!
Love it!! Pretty sure this is her new profile picture.
Also I thought her kissy face silly face was a completely cute picture too!
We decided to take a picture to show off her beautiful necklace and newly done nails! I had read to maximize the viewers attention to the necklace and her fingers that her chin and eyes should be looking away. Also her hands are placed above and below the necklace which draws the viewers eyes to both pieces! :)
I watched a Youtube video by Peter Hurley (who is one of the top 10 headshoot photographers in the world). And one of his tips was to have people bring the bottom lid of their eye up or to squinch. This was our result of trying it. It definitely looks different and it definitely has a model feel to it.
I also read a lot that a favorite pose of a lot of photographers is to have girls look down and close their eyes. Its supposed to show vulnerability and femininity.
I had read that fingers are supposed to direct people's attention to a certain feature. Here you can see that we were trying to feature Sam's eyes in the picture. We were calling it our America's Top Model pose.
In the past, almost every picture that I took of people was of their whole body. I was trying to get away from doing that, but after our photo shoot... I realized that I might have went a little extreme, because I didn't have hardly ANY pictures of her with her full body in it! Whoops! I'll have to keep that in mind for the next time that I'm taking pictures with someone.
Overall... I call my first photo shoot a success!! Sam was an awesome model!!! So naturally photogentic. And I'm super excited that some of my tips and things that I've learned helped make some of these pictures turn out super cute! I can't wait to find my next model! :)
