The Photographer’s Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone

The Photographer’s Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone
Lindsay Adler
Rocky Nook | 158 pp.  

The art of posing a portrait is fundamentally based on not posing your subjects—at least not so anyone will notice. The more natural someone appears in your frame, the more invisible the process is that goes into getting him or her to look that way. A pose can make or break a portrait, and there’s an abundance of books and online tutorials on the market dedicated to that fact. Among the cream of this crop is Lindsay Adler’s new book, The Photographer’s Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone.

Adler’s approach—in both her text and her carefully wrought photography—is refreshing and straightforward. It predictably includes the glossy imagery that’s the main theme of her commercial work but also includes a score of strictly tutorial examples, custom-shot for this book, to illustrate both the right and wrong ways to deal with specific challenges a particular sitter might present. She covers all the bases—men and women, family groups, couples and subjects that merit some special consideration, like the need to flatter a plus-size figure or to conceal some sensitive facial characteristic. Using sets of comparison shots, Adler reveals her holistic take on posing, stressing the resonance between body position and the physics of camera angle, focal length and camera-to-subject distance.

This is one of the more comprehensive treatments of this topic, and—if only as comprehensive anthology of creative posing solutions—a practical addition in your repertoire.

price: $39.95
rockynook.com