It doesn't matter how perfect your settings both in and out of the camera are, if your subject is posed poorly, the shot will be all but ruined. Here is a guide to some techniques on posing males for your next portrait shoot.
Over a decade ago I took on one of my first portrait shoots. Overall it went reasonably well — albeit not mind-blowingly successful — but my results were really hit and miss, once I got them into Lightroom. I was inexperienced, so perhaps I ought to have expected that outcome, but I couldn't work out why I didn't love some of the shots. I'd often got the lighting right, I'd taken the shot how I'd wanted with regards to depth and mood, but a lot of the shots that were technically good weren't "keepers."
Sometime later I realized my error: I didn't know how to pose males. You could be forgiven for not thinking there is a difference in difficulty between photographing men, women, and children, and in most regards, there isn't. However, we are inundated in mainstream media and social media — and have been since photographs could be printed — with images of posing women at a rate far higher than men. Once I had examined my own understanding of portraiture, I came to the conclusion that I simply didn't have many ideas for posing men in portraiture.
In this video, Pye Jirsa teams up with David Suh to go through techniques and tips for posing males. How do you pose different sexes? Is there a difference in how you approach the subjects?
