Your Posing Guide for Maternity Sessions

A Post By: Jackie Lamas 

Posing can feel a little repetitive after a few shots during maternity photo sessions and if this is how you feel, read the following posing guide for maternity sessions, so that you can get more ideas for your next shoot!

Interacting with the belly is a great pose for maternity photos.

Basic posing for maternity

Basic posing for maternity sessions is centered around the baby bump and the mama-to-be, specifically. You can use very basic posing to build from and add more variety to the poses. However, these basic poses are perfect for any session and can work well in any situation or location.

At 45-degrees from the camera is the best way to highlight the bump. Notice the hand placing to
accentuate the silhouette.

In order to flatter the baby bump the best, turn your client at least 45-degrees from the camera to either side. Ask which side is more natural to your client, so they feel more stable and at ease.

After you have turned your client, give her some shape by adding lines to her body. This creates more flow and adds some curves to break up the body. To do this, have your client pop out the knee that is closest to the camera. This helps guide the eye up from her leg to the bump, then ultimately resting on her face.

The knee closest to the camera is best for giving shape to the body, creating a natural leading line.

Finally, use her hands to cradle the bump, further adding emphasis to it. You can pose hands in a variety of ways:

• Place one on top of the bump and one under
• Both under
• One on the side and one under
• Only one hand on the bump

If your client is wearing a long, flowy dress, pose her hand under the belly, so that the bump is more prominent. With a flowy or loose dress, it can be difficult to fully see the bump’s shape if it’s not gathered underneath.

Same hand position in two different posed shots.

Using this basic set up is easy to build upon and add partners or other siblings to the mix. Posing the mama first is helpful as well, so that she doesn’t have to move around too much.
One great tip is to avoid having your clients look directly down at her belly. This can create an unflattering photo. Instead, have her look down with her eyes keeping her chin slightly up. Have her look down as if is she is trying to look past her belly and at her feet.

Posing with partners

Next in your posing guide for maternity sessions, is posing with partners. Posing with partners makes any maternity session a little more intimate.
Pose the mama first and have her partner fit in. This makes it easier to build poses and change it up when you want variety without tiring the mama out.

Using props can help with posing and highlighting certain details of the session.

Fit the partner in slightly behind your client and have their arms holding the baby bump. The partner can place their hand closest to the photographer under the belly. This might require the partner to come out a bit from behind. That’s okay. If they look comfortable in the pose, it’ll look better in the final image.

With the hands farthest from the camera, have the partner put their hand on the arm close to the shoulder. The mama can place her other hand on top of her bump.

Another great pose with the partner is to turn the partner away from your client slightly so they’re facing opposite each other with their shoulders touching.
Here, ask them to hold hands and have the mama lean into her partner. With her other hand, have her place it under the bump and pop one knee out to give her body a curve.

The bump isn’t the only focus. Try posing the partner caressing and cradling the bump by kneeling and getting close. Here you can ask them to give the bump gentle kisses. Talk to the baby, or simply close their eyes and enjoy.

In this pose, have mama look away and get a close shot of the moment. This can eliminate double chins or unflattering poses.

Posing with siblings

The next point in your posing guide for maternity sessions is working with children.

Working with children during a maternity session doesn’t need to get out of control. It’s best to start with the complete family, move onto shots with the mama and siblings, then some creative shots of everyone. Then, finally, let them go and play.

Allow children to cuddle and get close.

Getting photos of the siblings first can make the whole session go smoother in general. Again, begin by posing mama first. If they are in the session, place the partner next. Then place the children, or child, next to the parents.

For creative posing, if the children are 5 years or younger, you can have the parents hold them. Then get close-up shots of the family interacting.

Have them hold hands and walk along a path while they talk and interact with each other. These poses are more authentic and help children to be more active in the photos rather than forced to pose.

Switch between natural posing and posed

What is natural posing? It is when you give your clients an activity to do and allow them to enjoy the moment. For example, you can ask your clients to walk along the shore while they look at each other and enjoy the beach views.

Alternatively, it can be having the partner kneel down to the level of the belly and have them talk to the baby. Capture these moments from a bit of a distance so that your clients feel that they can enjoy the intimate moments.

Posed is when you direct your clients to stand, sit, or pose how you want for the final image. This can feel stiff after a while, so mixing natural poses with posed ones can offer a lot of variety in the final gallery.

Posing for maternity photos doesn’t have to be just posed, you can mix in a bit of the excitement and natural expressions adding to a variety of poses to build from.

I hope your posing guide for maternity sessions helps you with your next shoot. Do you have any posing ideas that work for maternity photos? Post in the comments below!

Share this article.

5 Tips for Photographing Portfolio-Worthy Costume Portraits

By: Charlie Moss 

There’s been an explosion of interest in photographing costume portraits over the last few years. From movie cosplays to historically-inspired portraits – there’s no end to the kind of costumes that could make their way into your portrait portfolio.
Shooting someone who is playing a role can bring a whole new dimension to your images. It can add depth and vibrancy to your portfolio. People often lose their inhibitions about being in front of the camera if they are pretending to be someone else!
With that in mind, here are my top five tips for creating portfolio-worthy costume portraits.

1. Be inspired by history

Fabulous costume portraits have been created throughout history, both in photography and in other kinds of art. Julia Margaret Cameron, for example, was a British photographer born in 1815 who used to shoot people dressed up as characters from Shakespeare. Her contemporary, David Wilkie Wynfield, would photograph his friends wearing fancy dress in the style of the great 16th-Century Venetian artist, Titian.
And don’t just stop at taking inspiration from photographer either – there are thousands of years of portraits to take inspiration from. In the portrait above, I took inspiration from a painting called La belle ferronnière by Leonardo da Vinci. Other times I’ve been inspired by different historical artists – Rembrandt lighting is a popular technique amongst photographers too and a great place to start!
Never be afraid to try self-portraiture when you’re experimenting with different lighting and looks inspired by historical portraits. It can take a bit of practice to get it right, and you will almost certainly be your most patient model! The shot above is the result of an hour locked in my studio experimenting with light and self-portraiture. I cannot recommend the Fujifilm camera system and app highly enough for shooting self portraits. You can focus and shoot at the touch of your phone screen!
Costume portraits are a great excuse to step away from the kind of lighting that you would usually use and try something different. If you always use studio lights then how about trying some available light? That’s how artists would have mostly worked in the past, and if it worked for them then it must be worth trying! Equally, if you usually work with available light then perhaps this is an excellent opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and try something tight and controlled with studio lights?

2. Check the costume faithfulness

I’m not suggesting for one moment that you should become a victim to historical or film accuracy in your costume portraits. But it does pay to just think through all of the elements that your subject is wearing or surrounded by.
In a costume portrait, even more so than a regular portrait, every aspect of the costume and any props contribute to the story being told by the final image. Ideally, nothing should appear in the final image that wasn’t intentionally put there to be a part of the story.
So if you are shooting a portrait inspired by a period of history, or perhaps inspired by a film or comic book, just take a little time to research your inspiration before scheduling a shoot. Check that your costume, accessories, and props aren’t going to be jarring to the story you are trying to tell.
This is where it might be worthwhile working with costume designers if you are new to styling costume portraits. Their expertise and advice on putting together and styling different kinds of costumes could save you an awful lot of time and heartache in the long run! Of course, there are always opportunities to hire costumes from theatres too – it can be a surprisingly cost-effective option.

3. Set the scene

Think about the scene that you want your character to inhabit. Are they royalty sitting atop a beautiful throne, or are they a post-apocalyptic warrior tracking danger through the forest? Scouting out a location and sourcing props to suit can be half of the fun when it comes to staging a costume portrait!
You can find great locations in the most surprising places. I have shot in front of huge roller shutter doors on industrial estates, in a scrubby bit of forest that looked like a dreamy estate in the final images, and against an old stone wall in my back garden. With the right lighting, lens selection, framing choices, and post-processing the most unexpected locations can look great in portraits.
But, of course, there’s always the option to head into the studio! Taking a subject into the studio and placing them against a plain backdrop can serve to really highlight the story you are telling through their costume and appearance. It puts the focus squarely onto the subject. This style of studio shooting can be a double-edged sword. There’s less room for mistakes in this kind of controlled studio portrait, but the payoff can be more than worth it when it comes to portfolio-worthy images.

4. Give your subject a character

When people usually sit for portraits they are playing themselves. So when you have someone sit for a costume portrait, it is helpful if you can have them play a role. It can help them to get into character more quickly and easily.
Before you do the shoot – while you’re pulling together your styling and location – think about the character that you’re looking to capture and write down a few thoughts as part of a shoot plan.
Are they a brooding young Victorian poet who lost their love? Perhaps they’re an underground rebel trying to uncover a government conspiracy four decades in the future? This is the driving force behind the entire shoot, so gear everything towards bringing this character to life.
Once you have your subject dressed up and with makeup done, equipped with props, and in the location you have chosen, all these elements should come together to help them portray the character. It’s their portrayal of the character that will shine through, tell the story, and truly make your shots portfolio-worthy.

5. Don’t forget the post-processing

You’ve styled an amazing shoot in a fantastically atmospheric location with a great team, and you’ve collaboratively told a compelling story. So what is next? Post-processing – that’s what.
The choices you make on the computer or in the darkroom after the shoot really help you focus the storytelling. Good post-processing can help elevate a portrait to something extraordinary.
You can make stylistic choices in post-processing that you may not otherwise make if you were shooting regular headshots or family portraits. For instance, when I shoot images with an apocalyptic theme, I tend to add lots of layers over the top to create a grungy look to the piece. If I am shooting something inspired by a sci-fi movie, then I often choose to push the colors quite hard to resemble the film grading used by cinematographers. Moreover, if I shoot something medieval- or viking-ish, I usually dull all the colors down and make the finished shots look “dusty” and worn.
With practice, you’ll find your style for post-processing costume portraits. Don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone and do something different from your usual approach. Everything about these images is already completely different from how most people would approach a regular portrait. It’s a chance to experiment!

Now that you’re armed with my top tips for shooting costume portraits, it’s time to try it out yourself! Remember to create a character, set the scene, and think about every element that you’re placing in the image. That way, you’ll tell a compelling and consistent story that shines through in the final image.
I’d love to see your attempts at shooting costume portraits. Post an image in the comments for everyone to see!

Share this article.

The Best Photographers Make Time To Practice

By: Charlie Moss 

The 10,000-hour rule is often quoted as the magic number of hours that you need to practice in order to master an activity. Now, I’m not saying that after 10,000 hours of practice you’ll definitely have mastered photography. But I do think it’s true that the more you practice, the better you will get!

The secret of practicing to improve your skills is to have a plan. You need to know what you’re practicing, you need to set goals, and you need to find a way to somehow measure your improvement.
Recently, I spent the day practicing with a new lens at Silverstone motor racing circuit. I just wanted to improve my panning to show speed and learn more about my equipment. I was reminded at the time that many photographers can find real joy in just practicing their craft and trying to improve. So with that in mind, here’s my guide on how to make a plan to make your practicing more productive!

Decide what to improve

It sounds obvious, but you need to start with something in mind that you’d like to improve. Wanting to improve your photography is too general. Try and narrow it down more. I wanted to improve my automotive photography and identified that shooting moving objects was a real weak spot in my technique.

Once you’ve narrowed it to something specific you can begin to research. Start here on Digital Photography School. There’s a handy search bar on every page to help you find articles that might be useful. Read those articles and make some notes on things to keep in mind when you’re next shooting. Start building your own instruction manual in your own words to take with you.

Plan your practice

When you’ve decided the things you want to improve, you need to start planning a subject, time, and a place to shoot. This could be as simple as photographing food in your kitchen, or as complicated as a week-long road trip. Put your plans in your diary and make a note of how long you’ve got to prepare. If you get organized, you’ll be far more likely to stick to your plan.

Make sure what you plan is something you find interesting too. Don’t plan for a day of photography (or even a few hours) that you’ll find boring and won’t enjoy. It’ll only put you off photography in the future.

Source the right equipment

If you need a piece of equipment that you don’t currently own, now is the time to decide how you’re going to get it. Hiring lenses can be a cheap way to try new options before buying (but borrowing from friends is even cheaper). Sometimes a piece of new equipment can be just what you need to kickstart your photography, but you need to practice and learn how to use it.
For some pieces of equipment, there are even DIY solutions. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try things out. It doesn’t matter if your shots aren’t perfect; this is an exercise in practicing, not perfection!

Take your notes with you

When you go out shooting to practice, make sure you take your notes with you. It doesn’t matter if they’re in a notebook or on your phone, but make sure you’ve got that research that you did while you were planning.
If you’re trying something new, then you may well have questions as you practice. Even if you’re an old hand at photography, it’s still good to refresh your knowledge before you start taking pictures.

Practice as much as you can, for as long as you can

The costs of film and developing don’t limit you in this digital age. This means you have the opportunity to shoot lots of images when you practice.

Digital storage is cheap, so take a couple of memory cards and keep shooting until you get it right.

Make the most of your time out practicing photography and shoot as much as you can. You never know which image you’ve taken will teach you something new. It could be the first, or it could be the last!
I like to make a day of it when I go out practicing, stubbornly shooting images long past everyone else has left, and my friends have got fed up. It feels like the more I practice, the more I learn, so I try to make the most of the opportunities I get to practice.

Don’t worry about perfection

The aim of practicing isn’t to get images for your portfolio or to take pictures to publish on social media or show your non-photographer friends. The aim is to improve your technique or your creativity.

Check your images as you shoot. The displays on the back of digital cameras are good enough to see 

if you’re on the right track.

You should be taking the opportunity to try new things and be experimental. Don’t just write off an idea that you’ve had because it won’t work – take the pictures and prove to yourself that it won’t work! You never know what you’ll learn from a failed experiment until you’ve got back home and reviewed the pictures.

Review your shots

Sometimes your practice will be over when you finish shooting. You’ll have learned enough about the technique that you don’t need to review the images.
However, while the experience is fresh in your mind, it’s worth sitting down at a piece of software such as Adobe Lightroom and reviewing the images in conjunction with the EXIF data to try and work out exactly what worked and why (and what didn’t work and why).

The Library module in Adobe Lightroom has the ability to view all the data from your images including shutter speed, ISO, aperture, and focal length. Start pulling up your images one by one, marking the ones that you like, and then reviewing the EXIF data for them.

Make some notes

Ideally, with the research notes that you made before you went shooting, make some notes on how your practice went. Look for patterns in the EXIF data to tell you what was successful and what wasn’t. Write down how you feel about the images, and perhaps make a note for other related techniques that you’d like to work on in the future.

Research how to correct your mistakes

If you consistently made the same mistake over and over while you were practicing, then you’ll want to work out how to fix that for next time.

Read some more articles or even try and find a mentor. Ask questions to your friends who seem to already have the technique nailed (or see if you can go shooting with them for some practice).
Make notes on how to improve for next time using everything you’ve learned so far. If you try and keep it all in your head, then I promise you’ll forget most of it before you get your camera out again!

Plan more practice

Practice makes perfect, after all. And you don’t learn everything on your first attempt.

Using the notes and research that you’ve gathered plan another time to practice. Perhaps this time you’ll work on something related that you’ve identified as a weak spot in your technique. Perhaps you could try the same technique but in a different setting (I’m planning a day out shooting moving wildlife next having now practiced on cars at a racing circuit).
Whatever you plan next, don’t stop practicing. Not even after you’ve reached over ten-thousand hours of practice because there’s always something new to learn.

Share this article.

An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop



Here's this weeks Photography Freebie.  Just copy and paste this link into your browser, click ENTER, and enjoy.

http://manuals.makeuseof.com.s3.amazonaws.com/for-mobile/idiots-guide-to-photoshop.pdf

4 Ideas for More Creative Shots when Photographing from One Position

By: Lily Sawyer 

This year, as has been the case in the past few years, as a family, we take a few days in the summer to go camping. I’m not going to lie; I find camping really tough. I don’t like the inconveniences camping requires but I do love the campfires and stargazing. This year has been particularly difficult as we went during a heatwave. The heat was relentless, and during the day we couldn’t even stay in our tents. We had to seek shelter in the forest for hours when not going on a long walk.

This article came to me on one of those mornings finding respite from the heat in the forest. My kids were drawing, sitting on the swings, hacking a path through some bushes, and I sat on a picnic blanket with my camera. I gave myself the maximum space of the mat to move around in, approximately 1.5m square. All I had with me was my Nikon D610 and a 60mm micro prime lens, so I gave myself a challenge. What can I photograph creatively whilst glued to this picnic mat?

4 ideas to get more creative shots when restricted in space and position

1. Direction and perspective

To get more creative shots, look at different perspectives. Here I lay down and looked upwards at the branches and leaves above me against the sky.

I tried to find more interesting compositions given the limited subject matter. Also, I tried to find layers of branches to achieve some bokeh and depth of field and focused on the nearest branches above me.

I moved around the mat while still on my back, and took shots with the tree trunks as leading lines reaching up to the sky for interest whilst still looking upwards as pictured above. Then I looked down and took some close up of twigs on the forest floor as pictured on the right below.

Look both directions: left and right.
To my left was this tree (pictured above left). I used the forest floor to create foreground interest, some greenery as the middle ground (which was focused), and the big tree in the distance as the background. To my left was a big tree trunk covered in moss and knots, both of which I found an interesting subject to take close-ups of.

This is what I love about this micro/macro lens. When you shoot close up, even at small apertures, you still get really pretty bokeh. So, I leveraged this and used the distant leaves and the sky to achieve bokeh behind the mossy trunk.

2. Distance

For more creative shots, take your gaze further and see what’s on the horizon. Below is the furthest view I could see.

To the left of this tree trunk is the tall spindly white tree that dominated my distant scenery. I thought this was a rather unusual tree and made for a good, strong subject. It stood out from the lush greenery as if constantly growing its way into the sky.

Also, don’t forget to check what’s right in front of you – especially anything that could be close-up material too. Below-right is a cut off tree shot at normal eye-view distance. I put a little leaf on top, so I had some close-up material to play with.

This trunk below was too far for me to reach or do a close-up of so this was my “midway” subject to photograph. Again, I used the foreground and background to create some interesting bokeh.

3. Create a new subject matter

Whilst it’s good to use our observational skills to find interesting things to photograph, we mustn’t solely rely on what’s already there! Get creative and think of unusual out-of-the-box ideas you can put together as your subject matter.
Here I happened to see heart-shaped leaf just outside the blanket I was sitting on, so I created a ring of seeds around it. I liked the way the colored leaf pops out of the brown earth.

Our picnic was laid out on the blanket and wondered what I could do with an empty water bottle. I photographed it looking through the hole at the top into the bottom of the bottle.

4. Experiment with effects

We had some plastic from our picnic stash and I used it to create a soft-focus effect on this landscape shot of the tree. I achieved this by wrapping the plastic around my lens, so it covered a little bit of the lens around the edges. Doing so, rendered those areas soft whilst the rest of the tree is still in focus.

I played around with how much or how little of the plastic I wanted to obscure the image. This one below had more soft-focus leaving only the strip of horizon sharp and clear.

I tried recreating a tilt-shift effect.
Tilt-shift lenses are called so because you can rotate, tilt and shift the lens optics in order to blur parts of the image whilst leaving other parts sharp if you wish. This is a neat trick when trying to photograph miniatures. I asked my daughter to create a little miniature teepee for me. These are my attempts whilst shifting the positional angles of my lens as I was still using the 60mm micro and not a tilt-shift lens.

This was a fun little challenge for me and got me out of boredom and into thinking creatively! I hope you enjoyed this and will try it sometime!
If you have any other ideas for more creative shots, share them in the comments below!


Share this article.

Are Photography Competitions Good for Your Soul?

By: Charlie Moss  

Are photography competitions good for your soul? The idea of diving headfirst into the promising ocean of photographic competitions is one that can be appealing. Imagine yourself surrounded by admirers – fame, and accolades aplenty for your work. The thought is pretty appealing, isn’t it?

But for most of us, that cool blue water of success turns out to be little more than a dream. Most competitions for most photographers and artists end with little more than a rejection letter, or a place on the shortlist if you’re very lucky.

What is there to gain?

Well, to be quite frank, there’s an awful lot to gain from entering your photography work into competitions. And pretty much all competitions will help you grow and improve as a photographer if you put some thought into the images you’re selecting.

Internet competitions can be a good way of working out which are your better images.

You can use competitions for different purposes. For instance, local club competitions or some of the online competition sites can be good for working out which variations of images appeal to people more. If you’re a little stuck with an image, then entering a local club competition might help you see some of the flaws in your shot.

Prizes, notoriety, or self-improvement?

At the top of the scale, there are huge cash awards and even residencies to win through photographic competitions. Of course, you can’t just make a living by winning competitions with your photos, but the kind of cash prizes that some competitions award will certainly pay a good chunk of your living expenses for a while!

But for most of us, what we gain is a wider audience and a better sense of our work. And these things are both important to photographers in their own way.
Having an audience isn’t just important for pros, it can open all kinds of doors for amateurs too. Plus, as much as we sometimes loathe to admit it – nice comments and ‘likes’ can go a long way to making us feel good about our work.
The process of selecting images to enter into a competition can be extremely powerful for your work. Trying to narrow all the photos you’ve taken into just a small handful that fit a brief is a difficult process. But this process should tell you something about yourself and your work, and perhaps even push your future work in a particular direction.
Entering competitions can be a great learning experience.

Protecting your mental health

We don’t always win competitions. Of course, it would be impossible for everyone to win every competition that they entered. Not placing in shortlists time and time again can be tough on our mental health.

You must make sure you’re entering competitions for good reasons, and not those that end up lowering your mood when you face rejection. Finding these reasons can be difficult even for seasoned photographers.
So how can you change bad reasons to good?

Think about why you’re entering competitions

Every now and then I like to reassess where I am with my competition goals to make sure I’m on track, and I invite you to do the same right now. Take a notepad and a pen and spend no more than five minutes jotting down the reasons that you might want to enter competitions.
Once you’ve taken some time to make that list, grab a coffee and review it. Take particular note of reasons that relate to your self-esteem. They could be reasons such as “I want to win competitions to prove I’m not a bad photographer,” or “I want to win competitions to show that time spent on my hobby is worthwhile.”
By framing your ambitions in this way, you’re dangerously close to resting your photographing (and personal) self-esteem on the result of the competition. Screw up the competition, and your photographic self-esteem drops. Photography should be pleasurable and fun to participate in, and competitions should support that.

Setting better goals

Instead, try to focus on goals that aren’t tied to your self-esteem. Hone in on more positive reasons to enter competitions such as “I want to enter competitions to help me develop my photographic voice” or “I want to enter competitions to encourage me to shoot a wider variety of subjects.”

These goals are not only much more achievable, but we don’t face the same kind of mood drop if we end up not winning. We have met our goal because our goal was simply to refine our work or shoot more variety. Anything additional, like placing on a shortlist, is a bonus.

Don’t forget to be kind to yourself

It’s important when entering competitions to be kind to yourself. Winning a competition can be a glorious feeling, but allow yourself to fail too. Failing is a very human trait, and it’s not something you will be able to escape.
Have compassion for yourself when the lows happen. Treat yourself to something you enjoy photographically and then go back out and get those goals on track.
Ultimately, you mustn’t allow competitions to have power over you. If the results of competitions become tied to the worth of your photography, then you’re on a rocky path that could end up with you falling out of love with photography. And you wouldn’t be here on this site if you didn’t love taking pictures.

Finding competitions to enter

If you start building your network of photographers who also enter competitions, you’ll start hearing about opportunities via word of mouth. But that’s not the only way to find new places to enter your photographs.

I use a service by Google called Alerts to keep up to date with what competitions are opening for entries. All you need is a Google account, and you can set the service up to send you regular alerts every time it picks up new content using the keywords you define.
These alerts have led me to hear about some interesting photography competitions that I wouldn’t have otherwise found.

So are photography competitions good for your soul?

In my opinion, they certainly can be. I feel that they help me develop my practice as a photographer, allow me to experiment freely, and allow me to be judged amongst my peers. Those three things are very important to me.
Competitions can also be a great chance to meet new photographers and discover new work. Going to your local camera club, or even the exhibition from a larger competition can be both productive and exciting!
But you must take steps to understand why you want to enter competitions with your photography and if you’re entering for good reasons. When stepping into the competitive photography arena, you first of all need to take steps to protect your mental health and ensure you’re not putting yourself at risk.
Do you think photography competitions good for your soul? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Share this article.