The Art Of UNposing Your Clients – You’ll Never Have To Remember Another Pose

The Art Of UNposing Your Clients – You’ll Never Have To Remember Another Pose with Alain Martinez

Posing couples is a subject widely coached and sold. There are countless training videos for sale out there on this subject, but how effective is it remembering these poses? And once you remember a handful, how hard is it to not fall into the same poses time after time? I remember I bought a DVD around 10 years ago at a tradeshow with over 500 poses—500 POSES! Today I don’t think I remember or use a single pose from that DVD. Today I focus on creating moments, finding good light and letting the uniqueness of each couple be the key ingredient to yield fun, creative and different portraits everytime—and THAT I call the art of UNposing.  

What if I told you that remembering a few different techniques will give you countless unique portraits and you’ll never have to remember another pose again? If you like more candid, fun and not-so-perfect, natural-looking portraits then read on, this article is just for you. If you like the classical, perfectly-posed photo that perhaps your parents had, or that you get in a studio, then this article is not for that, but I suggest you read anyway as it may give you some techniques for a completely different style and a new perspective that you might like. 

The following portraits were taken through the art of UNposing by creating moments that are fun and interactive. I can tell you that all my clients love these more than any posed photo because they feel they are “candid.” If you consider that we chose the background, the lighting, and told them what to do, it makes these shots less candid and more produced. However, because of the techniques I’m about to share next, they look totally candid as if I was a fly on the wall while these clients enjoyed their big day. 

What are these techniques?

Before you start clicking pictures and telling your clients to move, you have to find good lighting, and even though lighting is beyond the scope of this article, I’ll tell you a few things to keep in mind and some things to avoid.  

• Put bad lighting behind the subjects and fill in with reflector or flash.
• Side light is always sexier than front light.
• Find darker backgrounds than the foreground and expose for the faces.
• Avoid harsh overhead lighting that causes unattractive shadows. Nothing makes a photo more unattractive than deep, sharp and dark shadows under the eyes, nose and chin.  
• Avoid blown out backgrounds.

Lighting could be its own separate article, but these five tips above are very helpful to remember. Now that you have good lighting, or at least are avoiding bad lighting, here’s what I do every single time to UNpose our clients.