Posing
Anniversary photoshoot poses
Same grammar as any couple session, with more permission to be still — long relationships photograph well precisely because the awkwardness is gone.
Posing
Same grammar as any couple session, with more permission to be still — long relationships photograph well precisely because the awkwardness is gone.
In short: Same grammar as any couple session, with more permission to be still — long relationships photograph well precisely because the awkwardness is gone.
Quiet, intimate, no face management required.
The workhorse. Real conversation, shot in bursts.
Both faces in the same focal plane.
Uses a real location and occupies the hands.
Say something the photographer cannot hear.
A metre of space. It reads differently from every close frame and it breaks up a set.
Start with forehead to forehead — the first two minutes are warm-up and the first pose should be the one that asks least of anyone. Move to walking and talking and one behind the other, arms around once the shoulders have dropped, and keep apart, looking at each other for the end, when self-consciousness has gone. Shoot each one in bursts through the movement rather than holding it: the usable frames sit between the instructions, not on them.
Two metres back with the lens zoomed rather than close and wide — distance is what keeps facial proportions natural. Camera at or slightly above eye level for portraits, at chest height for full length. Below eye level enlarges whatever is nearest the lens, which is rarely what you want in frame.
The dip kiss and any recreation of a stock-photograph pose. After ten years together those look borrowed, and the whole value of the session is that it is not.
Treating it as a formal portrait sitting. Choosing a location neither of you has been to. And planning it around a restaurant booking, so the whole shoot is rushed before a table at seven.