Lesson Title: Body Balancing: Making Ordinary People Look Good
Lesson Description:
Every client that walks into your studio should expect professional
results. They want to look better than what they are. We get normal
people with various body sizes and shapes. Some are short, some are very
tall, some are heavy-set and, as professionals, it is up to us to make them
look more than ordinary through lighting and posing techniques.
One momentous event for a lot of couples is their wedding day. Most
brides go on a diet months before the wedding to lose weight and most
photographers, unfortunately, don’t understand how to balance and
position the bride’s body and end up adding more weight to
them. This is very easy to do since they are wearing white, which is
contrasted by the groom who normally wears black, which is more
slimming. The techniques I will discuss
can be used to help balance people in weddings or portraits, or in any
events. Lesson
Requirement: Most
beginning photographers go for expression and never look at the form.
The techniques I described will force you to start noticing body forms of
both men and women. The bottom line is not to make the woman look
heavy. You may submit up to two images.
Reference Material:
Hanson’s DVDs: Classic Ten Poses – Describes how to
position the body based on different body types by using body blocking and
various posing techniques. Tips:
The first thing you should do when you look at your subject is to view
them with one eye because your camera lens has one “eye”. As
people, we see the world in three dimensions, whereas the camera sees it in
two dimensions. How we get the third dimension on our photographs is to add
the proper lighting. If a couple is next
to each other, they are seen as “normal” by the camera. In
other words, the camera sees them for their true body proportion. One
scenario is when a small man is standing next to a larger woman, the woman
will look bigger. To make the couple look proportionally even, we need to
position them in a more flattering way. First, we want to position the
man’s body squared to the camera to make his body look wider and
bigger. Second, the man needs to be 4-7 inches closer to the camera, again
to make him seem bigger than the woman. Third, the woman’s body
should be turned to the man to give an illusion that she is thinner.
The aperture may be set to f/11 – f/16 to ensure that both subjects
are in focus. Fourth, the lighting pattern should be broad lighting
on the man and short lighting on the woman.
Another scenario to consider is a small woman standing next to a larger
man (i.e. woman is 110 lbs, man 300 lbs). The first thing to do is
distinguish the different body types: A-type is small and B-type is large.
In positioning the body, if you put B in front of A, A will virtually
disappear. The correct way instead is to put A in front of B. This
way the woman’s body (A) will block about fifty percent of the
man’s body (B) thus making him more proportional to her. I refer to
this pose as the classic prom shot.
Critique:
In my experience, I’ve found that females are generally the
decision makers, thus it is important that I do my best to make them look
proportionally good, no matter the body type. Never add more weight than
you have to.
Copyright & Rights: Please adhere to all the rules and
regulations of copyright with your images and the copyright of
others. Also, listen to the audio
interview on copyright with attorney Robert Cavallo in the Conference
Room at Photoworkshop.com.
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Bios. |
