Amanda, among others, has recently asked me a very, very, good question: “How you can work out the best angle to capture your best features and hide your worst!”
Well, you could spend hours in front of a mirror – posing, turning, adjusting, tweaking, trying to remember what you’ve done that works… But the problem with THAT solution is that you’re only ever going to see yourself from a single viewpoint. Your eyes are always stuck in your head and you have no way of knowing how you look from any perspective other than what is fixed in your sockets *smiles* One way around that is to spend a few thousand dollars, and a few months of your life, studying the way models do – learning how to ‘work the camera’ and take ‘direction’ from photographers, stylists and artistic directors…
Alternatively, you can work with a professional photographer that specialises in working with non-professional subjects (I mean, people that aren’t professional models). Thankfully the professional photographer – unlike yoruself – isn’t limited to seeing and capturing things from a single fixed location. Not only do I know EXACTLY how to pose you – how to work with you and explain exactly how to position yourself to show off your best or favourite features, and minimse your least favourite ones – but also exactly which angle is best for any given pose.
I could go into all of the nitty gritties (there’s a lot of physics and a bit of math involved), but that would be allowing my geeky side to show through pretty boring and take QUITE a while. So I created a video instead, to show you – visually – the huge difference even one very small change can make.
Oh and one last thing (before you study the images) – what you see below are images are Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC). Excepting a black and white conversion (and resizing), I’ve not done anything else to these portraits. I’ve written, very specifically, about the differences between SOOC images, proofs and print-ready images (click here to open the article in a new tab).
In THIS instance, I’ve elected to use the SOOC images to show you that it’s not about Photoshop Trickery – just good, old fashioned, skill and expertise that you just can’t fake.
If you have any questions you’d like to see answered, feel free to leave a comment below or on my facebook page. I’ll see you in the next video!
Camera approximately 1' above the ground
Camera approximately 5' above the ground.
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