How do I pose clients who have never modeled before?

I demonstrate every pose myself before I ask you to hold it, and then I keep directing while you are in it: where your weight sits, where your hands rest, what your shoulders and chin are doing, and what your face is saying. You are never left standing in front of a camera deciding what to do with yourself.

We also begin with the easiest positions and work toward the harder ones, so that by the time a pose asks something real of you, your body already understands the language. No modeling experience is needed. That is not encouragement, it is how the session is built.

I show you the pose before you try it

Describing a pose in words does not work. Turn slightly, drop the far shoulder, lengthen the neck means four different things to four different people, and while a woman is translating that sentence her face goes somewhere I do not want it to go.

So I stand where you will stand and do the pose myself, including the parts that feel strange from the inside. You copy a shape instead of decoding an instruction. Copying is far easier than inventing, and it removes the hesitation that otherwise shows in the eyes.

The direction does not stop once you are in the pose

A pose is not a position you arrive at and hold. It is adjusted continuously, in small amounts, while I am photographing.

• Weight: which foot carries you, and how the hips answer.
• Hands: where they meet the belly, and where the fingers stop.
• Shoulders: down and back, which changes the entire line of the body.
• Chin: forward, then slightly down, which is most of the difference between a photograph and a snapshot.
• Expression: the breath before the smile, more often than the smile itself.

I speak almost the whole way through. When the room goes quiet for long, that usually means something has stopped working and I am about to change it.

We build from simple to harder

The first look is deliberately easy. Standing, facing the light, weight on one foot, hands where hands naturally want to go. Nothing there requires courage, and that is the point.

By the second or third look I can ask for something that needs trust: a seated position, a pose on the floor, a strong line through the arms, bare skin with neutral fabric. In my experience those are often the strongest photographs in the gallery, and they are only possible because they came third rather than first.

The first ten minutes are the ones nobody needs to worry about

Almost every woman is stiff at the start, and almost every woman stops noticing the camera somewhere in the second look. I plan the order around that. The look that matters most to you is rarely the one we shoot first, because I would rather photograph it after your shoulders have come down.

How you are posed follows what you want, not your size

Posing decides what a photograph emphasizes, so I choose it from what you tell me you want: more coverage, the belly clearly the subject, a longer line through the body, support for a fuller bust, something bolder and more editorial. Never from body type or size.

Tell me before the day and the poses are already chosen when you arrive, which means the session time goes into photographing rather than into deciding.

What happens during a maternity photoshoot