The Real Reason Your Couples Look Awkward in Photos (And How to Fix It)

Getting genuine, relaxed-looking images from couples at weddings has less to do with knowing the right poses than most people assume. The mental shift behind how you approach directing people is what separates stiff, uncomfortable photos from ones that look effortless.

Coming to you from Luke Cleland, this candid video walks through a philosophy shift that changed how Cleland approaches posing and directing couples entirely. Early in his career, Cleland describes the anxiety of relying on poses pulled from Instagram, trying to replicate specific positions and hoping each couple would fit into them. The pressure that came with that approach was significant. He felt a kind of panic every time couple portraits started, worried he'd missed some pose that would have made the difference. The problem, as he explains it, is that wedding clients aren't models. They don't know how to translate verbal instructions into natural-looking body language, and that gap is where things fall apart.

Cleland draws a clear line between commercial work and wedding photography. With a hired model, you can describe a vision, and a skilled model knows how to get there while still looking relaxed. Wedding clients rarely have that skill, and asking them to hit specific marks produces exactly the stiffness you're trying to avoid. The reframe Cleland landed on is thinking of the session as guiding people along a journey rather than directing them into a sequence of setups. Simple instructions that anyone can follow, no matter their height, comfort level, or prior camera experience, become the vehicle for naturally arriving at great images. The goal shifts from "get them into this pose" to "help them forget they're being photographed."

Where this gets practical is in the priority order. Cleland argues that making people feel comfortable and confident in front of the camera should be the primary objective, with technical posing layered in once that foundation is there. When people genuinely relax and feel good, they fall into positions organically, sometimes ones you wouldn't have thought to direct them into at all. That's the part of the process Cleland now finds genuinely exciting rather than stressful. The rest of the video covers the specific techniques he uses to get couples to that relaxed state, including how he structures his language and movement cues to guide people without them realizing they're being guided. He also mentions a posing and directing course linked in the video description if you want to go deeper on the system he's built around this approach. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Cleland.