The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone

The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone starts from an uncomfortable but accurate observation: most portrait photographers know how to run a camera, yet far fewer know how to direct the person in front of it. You can nail the light and dial in the settings and still walk away with images that do not work. Nine times out of ten the problem is not technical, it is the pose: an awkward hand, a shoulder that juts out, an expression that reads stiff where it should read natural.

Lindsay Adler, a fashion and portrait photographer and a much sought-after educator, offers a system rather than a catalogue of poses to copy. The book opens with something most posing guides skip entirely: how the camera shapes the body, because lens choice, angle and perspective change the way a figure reads in a photograph. From there she builds a ten-step framework that works with any subject, walks through the five most common mistakes —posture, foreshortening, mergers, hands and expression— with before-and-after examples, and gives dedicated chapters to women, men, couples, curvy subjects, families, boudoir and maternity, each with five go-to poses.

Published by Rocky Nook in 2017 at 448 pages, the volume includes train-your-eye exercises in every chapter and closes with complete real-world sessions with five different subjects, applying the full system from start to finish. That is what keeps it in use as a reference: it trains judgement in real time instead of memorising formulas that may not suit the person in front of the lens.