The confident subject versus the shy one
Okay. Last two lessons we gave the hands a job and the eyes a job. Today we're talking about the person attached to the hands and eyes, because not every person needs the same management.
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you start doing this: the confident subject and the shy subject are both work. They're just different work. And if you treat them the same way you'll get bad results out of both of them.
The shy one
Most people who sit for a photo are a little nervous, even if they don't say so. They don't know what to do with their face. They've had a bad experience with a camera before, usually from a school photo or a driver's license photo, and they're bracing for that same result.
Your job with a nervous subject is not to direct them harder. It's to get them talking about something else. I know I've said this before in this class and I'll keep saying it because it's the whole ballgame: the posed shot is rarely the keeper. The good frame happens in the gap between poses, when the person forgets you're taking pictures.
Practical version of this at home: ask a real question and let them answer it while you keep shooting. Not "how was your day," something with texture. What they're proud of lately. A trip they're planning. Their dog. Keep your finger near the shutter the whole time because the good expression shows up mid-sentence, not on command, and it's gone fast.
Give them small, low-stakes instructions instead of big ones. Not "smile natural" — nobody on earth can do that on request. Instead: "tilt your chin down just slightly," "turn your shoulder toward the window," "look at that tree for a second." Small mechanical instructions are easier for a nervous person to execute than "relax," which is a command literally nobody has ever successfully followed.
The confident one
This is the one people assume is easier, and honestly it can go either way. A subject who's genuinely comfortable in front of a camera will give you a lot of usable frames fast. But a subject who knows they're good in front of a camera will start performing, and performing reads as performing. It looks like a magazine ad instead of a photo of a person.
My middle one, Leilani, is like this. She's genuinely photogenic and she knows it, and for a while that made her harder to shoot than her more awkward siblings, not easier. She'd hit a pose, hold an expression, angle her chin just so, and every frame looked like she was auditioning for something. Technically fine. Just not her.
What worked was giving her a task that had nothing to do with the camera. I'd say "look at your brother, not me," or "tell me what's wrong with this weather," anything that pulled her attention off performing and onto an actual thing. The second she stopped thinking about how she looked, she looked like herself again. That's really the whole trick with a confident subject: distract them from their own confidence.
The opinion part
At the end of the day, posing is people management, not art direction. You don't need to be a director with a vision. You need to be able to read a nervous person and calm them down, and read a performing person and snap them out of it. If you've ever run a carpool or talked a toddler out of a meltdown in a grocery store, you already have the skill set. The camera part is honestly the easier half.
A few practical things to try
- With a nervous subject, start shooting before you think you're ready. Some of your best frames will happen while they think you're still setting up.
- Ask questions that require more than a yes or no answer, and keep the conversation moving so there isn't a silence where they start performing on their own.
- With a confident subject, give them a job that has nothing to do with looking good — look at this, hold this, walk toward that mark — so their attention goes somewhere other than their own face.
- Shoot more than you think you need either way. You will throw away more frames from a confident subject who's performing than from a nervous one who's just being themselves, and that surprises people.
One honest caution here, not really a safety one but close to it: don't force a smile out of someone who clearly doesn't want to give you one. I learned this photographing my daughter Kaylee for a school project — she had braces at the time and would not smile no matter what I asked, and pushing on it just made her more locked up. I stopped asking and kept talking until she laughed at something dumb her brother said off camera, and that was the shot. You can't push a real expression into existence. You can only get out of its way when it shows up.
Before next time: find a willing subject, one you'd call shy and one you'd call a natural in front of a camera, and try to get one un-posed frame out of each of them using the tricks above.