Our Toronto Wedding Photography Blog receives many requests from novice wedding photographers asking us how to quickly improve their posing skills. We’ve decided to put together a short tutorial on wedding photography posing, which should help make people look great in their wedding pictures.
Let’s start by defining what makes a great wedding portrait? In our opinion a successful wedding picture should be about revealing the uniqueness, personality and most of all a special connection between the Bride and Groom.
We also know that wedding couples favor candid wedding pictures with genuine emotions, spontaneity and real smiles in them. A well-crafted portrait will reveal characteristics that are unseen by the eye but experienced through the subject’s emotions – love, happiness, friendship, and inner beauty. In essence our job as a wedding photographer is to ensure that portraits are as individual as each person we photograph and that we have ability to bring out that inner beauty and capture it.
Because we don’t believe in faking the spontaneity of the subject’s expression we’ve come up with few “games†that can help expose those real emotions in front of the camera. We call these techniques the organic style of wedding photography posing.
- Telling Secrets –We ask the Groom to whisper something “dirty†in the Bride’s ear. You will get the whole range of expressions on the Bride’s face. All of them will be priceless! Make sure you get them all.
- The Last Hug – Tell them to hug each other, and let them do it, then say “Okay this time hug like it’s the last time you will ever see each other again … time to bring out the kleenex 🙂
- “Smell their temple†– Just like it sounds… Tell either the Bride or Groom to smell the other’s ear or temple. Then you’ll get one looking at you and smiling and the other looking like they are nuzzling the side of the other’s head … very sweet and natural.
- Kiss and smile at the same time – Tell the Bride and Groom to kiss and smile at the same time. Great spontaneous pose!
- Kissing-game – We ask the bride and groom to face each other and don’t move their feet. Then we ask the Groom to try to kiss his bride but the Bride’s job is to try to avoid his kisses.
So here you have it – some basic techniques of natural posing. You can try to mix and match these techniques and add your own variations. Remember that If you want improve your wedding portraits, your goal must be to capture the true individuality and personality of the Bride and Groom. The posing has to be natural to the person you’re photographing and to reflect the person’s personality and not detract from them.