When I was first leaning posing, I had such a hard time

with it. I would sit someone down and my mind
would race, trying to figure out how to make the subject look com-
fortable and yet stylish. I would go to seminars and look in maga-
zines to get posing ideas, but it seemed that when a paying client’s
session started the ideas went right out of my head.
We live in a world that has us looking for immediate solutions to
long-term challenges. I see my sons trying to learn something new,
and they get frustrated because they don’t master it in the first five
minutes. Whether it is lighting, learning digital, or especially posing,
you won’t get it the minute you put the book down. That would be
like picking up a book on karate and thinking that when you finished
reading it you would be a black belt. Posing is a learning process
and, like all learning processes, it takes time and practice.
I realized, early on, that if I was going to become effective and
comfortable with posing, I needed to practice often and in the same
situations that I would be needing to use this skill. I needed to prac-
tice under the pressure of a session, not as I was fooling around
shooting a test session of someone I knew. I also had the realization
that I didn’t have ten years to get good at posing my clients—I
needed to get as many poses down as I could, and do it as quickly
as possible. This led to what I call variations.

Practicing with Variations.

Variations is an exercise I make every photographer in my studio use
(including myself) in every session they do. It provides practice in

114 POSING FOR PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY

10. VARIATIONS.

We live in a world that has

all of us looking for immediate

solutions to long-term challenges.