Keep talking, keep shooting
Okay. Last two lessons we gave the hands a job and the eyes a job. This lesson is about what you do with your mouth while all that's happening, because it turns out that matters just as much.
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you start photographing people. The camera part is honestly the easy part. You've got that mostly down at this point. The hard part is standing there while another human being feels awkward in front of you, and figuring out how to make that go away.
Posing, at the end of the day, is people management. It's not art direction. Nobody's looking to you for a creative vision. They're looking to you to tell them what to do with their body so they can stop thinking about their body. If you've ever run a carpool, organized a potluck, or gotten a group of coworkers to actually show up somewhere on time, you already have the main skill. You just haven't pointed it at a camera yet.
The problem you're actually solving
A nervous subject looks nervous. It shows up in the shoulders, the jaw, the eyes. You can have perfect light and a perfectly clean background and the photo still won't work because the person in it is bracing for the shutter like it's a dentist appointment.
Your job is to lower that. Not with a pep talk. With talking, period. Continuous, low-key, doesn't-matter-what-about talking.
I mean this literally. Ask what they had for lunch. Ask about their dog. Ask them to tell you about a trip they're planning. It does not need to be interesting. It needs to exist, because silence is where people get self-conscious and start doing the thing with their face.
How this works at home
Grab whoever's around tonight, or plan to grab someone this week. Here's the pattern I want you to try.
Start before you're ready. Get your camera up and start shooting while you're still getting them settled. Not because those frames are keepers, but because it gets them used to the sound of the shutter before it means anything. By the time you're actually composing a real shot, the click isn't a big deal anymore.
Ask a real question, not a photo question. Don't say "can you smile more naturally." Nobody has ever smiled more naturally because they were told to. Ask them something they'd answer if you didn't have a camera at all.
Keep the shutter going while they answer. This is the part people skip. You ask the question, they start answering, and you're shooting the whole time, including the two seconds before they figure out what to say and the half-second after they finish and relax. Those in-between frames are usually the best ones in the whole set. The posed moment, where they're holding a smile and waiting for you, is almost never the shot. The shot is what happens right after, when they think you're done and you're not.
Shoot more than feels reasonable. I know I've said this before but it matters more here than anywhere else in the class. If you take twelve frames you'll probably get one you like. If you take sixty you'll get several. The keeper rate doesn't go up because you're getting better mid-session, it goes up because you're giving the good moment more chances to happen.
The garbage can lid
I'll tell you about the first time I really tried to do a proper portrait. This was years ago, William standing in the backyard, and I was so locked in on getting his face right, his expression right, the exposure right, that I didn't look at anything else in the frame. I got home, pulled the pictures up, and there it was in every single one. A garbage can lid. Just sitting there in the corner of the shot like it had something to say.
I hadn't even registered it was there while I was shooting. I was so focused on the person that I stopped looking at the frame as a whole.
So here's the habit that came out of that, and it applies double when you're talking your subject through a session, because talking takes up bandwidth you'd otherwise spend checking things. Before you fire off a real frame, do a fast lap around the edges. Top corner, bottom corner, both sides, then the face. Takes about a second once it's automatic. It is not automatic yet for most of you, so make yourself do it on purpose for now.
A caution worth saying plainly
If your subject is a kid or someone who gets fidgety, don't do this exercise near a hard edge, a step down, or anything they could back into while they're looking at you instead of where they're walking. You're asking people to relax and stop paying attention to their surroundings. Make sure the surroundings are safe enough that they can.
Before next time
Photograph one person this week using nothing but conversation to get your shots, no posing instructions at all, and see which frame you like best. My guess is it won't be the one where they knew you were taking it.