Tips and Techniques for Photographing a Plus-Size Model

As a photographer you are often presented with a wide range of both challenges and opportunities. Along with managing your lighting, your camera settings, and your location selections, the physical proportions of the individuals you work with will also play a part in how you set up specific poses and shots.

People come in all shapes and sizes, it's what makes us all so incredibly beautiful and unique. It's also one of those factors that means you, as a photographer, have to be confident and prepared to deliver consistent quality for your customers and models regardless of their body type. Helping your subjects pick outfits can be a great time to get to know their level of comfort with being in front of the camera and will also allow you to help them select pieces appropriate for them and the shoot you are setting up.

Whether you are working with taller people, shorter people, thinner people, or thicker people, you will likely find yourself trying some shots and poses on some shoots and then utilizing completely different techniques on others. This is simply because what works for one person may just not work for another. This video by Irene Rudnyk gives some great tips and advice for setting up and navigating a photoshoot with a plus-size model. Whether this is something with which you already have experience or not, this quick behind-the-scenes look at one of her shoots gives some great insight into how she sets up poses and shots for her model. For each example she gives, she also gives some great perspective into what she's looking at and why she set up shots the way that she did. 

I, for one, found her advice about the placement of the model's arms to be particularly helpful because it's simply something I hadn't thought about before. Is there something that stood out to you, maybe a tip that you hadn't thought about beforehand? Whether you learned something new from the video today, or if you have any of your own tips you'd like to share, make sure to comment down below.