Siegel - Photographing women : 1,000 poses

Eliot Siegel

Photographing Women: 1,000 Poses
By Eliot Siegel

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ISBN 13 978-0-321-81433-3
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When I started taking photos of my friends in high school back in 1975 (pictures that were the seventies equivalent to your average Facebook profile picture of today), I never thought for even a moment that as an adult Id end up working as a professional fashion and portrait photographer. As I progressed through school, I started absorbing some of the theory that I was picking up in my photography classes, and then I caught the bug: a serious passion for photographing anything and everything.

Throughout my university years, I concentrated on becoming a full-time fine art photographer, shooting urban landscapes and edgy portraits of interesting people. It was then that a professor challenged me to combine my love of landscape and portraiture by trying my hand at fashion photography, my first commercial venture.

Remembering my first efforts, and photographing the pretty young women at university, one interesting question kept arising. When the young, inexperienced models were in front of my camera, they almost invariably asked the same thing: What do you want me to do? Even young professional models today still ask that same question.

Knowing what you want, as a serious yet inexperienced photographer, takes a fair amount of research. You should study all the magazines youd love to work for and decide not only on the shooting style youd like to adopt and make your own, but also how you want your models and subjects to respond to your cameras and conceptshow they should pose in the environments you create, both in the studio and on location.

With nearly 30 years in the business, Ive worked for highly respected fashion magazines from New York to Milan, Paris, and London, and shot for clients such as Macys and Bloomingdales in the USA and Nokia, Reebok, Marks & Spencer, Selfridges, and many others throughout Europe. Ive always hoped to achieve a higher level of trained visual integrity, not only for my studio and location compositions, or due to my dedication to beautiful lighting technique, but also to achieve a sense of intimate communication and understanding between my subjects and myself. Creating an instant relationship with models in fashion and sitters in my portrait work is the reason I continue to commit myself to this profession.

Ive written this book as a handy reference guide to intelligent posing, and to celebrate the multitude of elegant, unusual, and even humorous poses that can be achieved by photographers and their models with just a bit of curiosity and investigation. I wanted to demonstrate that there is a pose for every garment, situation, and possibility under the sun.

Id like to thank the many photographers Ive researched from around the globe who kindly contributed to this effort, not only by supplying their own brands of brilliant photographic work on posing, but also with their insightful words capturing their own take on the concept of the pose.

This book is organized into two chapters. The first, Technical Know-How, is your professional guide to the process of photography, from start to finish. The second chapter, The Poses, is a comprehensive directory featuring over 1,000 poses for photographing women. Split into key categories, youll be able to find a variety of poses to rework in your own shoots.

Sequences

Photographer Profiles