Posing for Portrait Photography

Which of the above photographs do you like better? If you are

like all the people I showed these photographs to, you would say

the one on the right. Well there goes the classic theory of posing

shot right in the keister. According to that theory, a woman is always

supposed to tilt her head toward her higher shoulder. Well, in these

two images, tilting the head toward the high shoulder makes her

look as though she just sat on a very sharp object and is waiting until

we take the picture to get the heck off of it. By tilting the head into

what traditionalists consider a “man’s” pose, we made her look con-

fident, beautiful, and nothing like a man.

The Real Rule. Now that I have had a little fun, I can contin-

ue. The real rule of tilting the head is that there is no rule. You don’t

alwaysdo anythingin photography—especially nowadays. If you are

photographing a woman, you don’t tilt toward the high shoulder

and you don’t tilt toward the low shoulder, you tilt toward the

shoulder that looks good.

Hair.When photographing a woman with long hair, I look to

the hair and not the gender to decide the direction the head will be

tilted and the direction in which the body will be placed. Long hair

is beautiful, and there must be an empty space to put it. A woman’s

hair is usually thicker on one side of her head than the other. The

POSING THE FACE 47

The only difference between these two por-
traits is the tilt of the subject’s head—but what
a difference it makes!

When photographing a woman

with long hair, I look to the hair

and not the gender to decide the

direction the head will be tilted.