Posing Tips For Wedding & Couples Photography
Photographing couples who are easy to pose - in your couple’s sessions and at weddings - is not the norm, but the exception.
As a photographer, your job is to create a comfortable and safe environment where your couples can let their guard down and express their true emotions in front of the camera.
…So you can capture those truly emotive shots that tell their unique love story.
But let's be honest, it can be daunting AF, right?
Raise your hand if you've ever struggled with posing, froze up, or did not know what to do next during a couple's session or while photographing a wedding. …We've all been there at some point.
In this episode of the podcast (or keep reading below), we share insights on how we approach our couple's sessions. Our goal is to make sure you are leaving your session capturing authentic moments that your couples can look back on forever and remember.
Before we dive in, you’ve caught our FREE POSING WEBINAR, right?!
If you haven't already watched it (missing out), we have a free posing webinar where Nicole photographs a real-life, in-home couple's session from start to finish.
It’s free to watch - tap HERE, or on the banner below to watch.
And keep this tab open to refer back to as you watch. Or listen to the podcast episode above after you’ve watched the webinar for some bonus content - because we’re about to share even more posing tips and insights from what Nicole was thinking as she photographed that couple’s session.
We've all experienced a shoot or couple's session that flowed effortlessly and felt natural. We often wish we could replicate that feeling at every single one of our sessions.
But that’s not always going to happen.
That's why it's crucial to be intuitive during your couple's sessions and weddings. You need to understand and get to know the unique dynamics of each couple, read their vibe and direct them accordingly.
Mastering the art of posing is KEY to running your sessions intuitively and capturing those real moments - let’s get into our posing tips.
Getting your couples feeling comfortable in front of the camera
It’s so common for you to show up at a shoot and the movement you’re going for doesn’t come right off the bat.
Awkward vibes happen.
It’s your job to get your couples feeling as comfortable as possible in front of the camera.
In the webinar, at the very beginning, Andre is clearly uncomfortable and it is taking hime some time to get there (which is totally normal).
It’s so easy for something like this to put you into panic mode - ‘shit - this is going to be a hard session’. But don’t let it overwhelm you.
When your couples start asking questions like "What do you want me to do?" or "Is this okay?" you need to redirect their focus away from overthinking and encourage them to move naturally.
In this shoot Nicole is trying to get a ton of movement going right from the start. With lots of fun elements to promote laughter.
Movement being the sole thing that will get your couples out of their heads.
Nicole starts with face to face poses and small movements that would take Andre’s mind off feeling nervous and uncomfortable.
As the session starts to flow more easily and the couple starts to tune into Nicole’s guidance a little more - she starts to ask more of our couple.
The next thing Nicole Asks them is to ‘act like you're hanging out watching a movie on the couch together’.
Everyone understands what this means - it’s easy for them to emulate. This helps to keep the session feeling comfortable and promote lots of natural movement - again getting them out of their heads.
Incorporating details into your couple’s shoots and wedding galleries
The small details from your couple’s sessions are what really helps you tell a story in your gallery.
In the case of this session in the webinar it’s the hand holding, the way he touches her face, the way they're interacting with each other.
You want to be capturing all of the little details like that at your session. But to do that you need them interacting. You want them to get a little more close and intimate.
In the webinar you’ll notice Nicole doesn’t leave any silence or time for the couple to overthink and feel uncomfortable when they are first getting comfortable. In the webinar you’ll also hear some repetition. Doing this is super important to stop them slipping back into a nervousness or discomfort.
This is where you really have to lean onto your own intuitive creativity and visual strength to get them looking natural and feeling at ease without ever acknowledging to the client that they look awkward - that’s only going to make them more uncomfortable!
We talk in The Posing Course, about how to capture the emotion and little details once they’re in a position where you want to photograph them. And it’s where you can hear a lot more of our thought process behind why we're saying what we're saying and what works time and time again.
How to decide when you’ve got the shot
How many times have you gone through your photos after a shoot and realized the bulk of them are your couple standing chest to chest?
It’s such an easy mistake to make.
So it’s important to be strategic about the poses you’re getting your couples into and being conscious about knowing when to move from one pose to the next.
Here are a few things that will help us decide when we’ve got the shot at a session…
When you’re thinking about what your couple’s gallery is going to look like and intuitively know you need some more variety and different poses.
When you're feeling kinda over a particular pose or position. You can just tell that maybe the pose you have your couple in has become stiff or your couple’s energy has dropped and it’s time to change things up.
When you're thinking about your editing later on & you think ‘I’ve got 500 photos of this already. Time to move on’.
When you shift poses or positions, particularly with an in-home shoot, you don’t want to make huge transitions, because it can break up the flow - leaving you to rebuild the trust and comfort level all over again.
You want to encourage them to make little shifts into a different position or area of the room.
This is where having a go-to mental check list of standard poses in your back pocket can help massively - and we share our go-to poses in The Posing Course.
Creating candid moments in your couple’s sessions
In the webinar you’ll see a couple of moments where McKenna was starting to feel much more comfortable in front of the camera and have fun with it. When she started to actually interact with the camera, making jokes with us & her man. Maybe some of these ridiculous faces aren’t the moments that we or our clients want pictures of. BUT…
The good stuff comes right after those moments - where you can capture a truly candid laugh or moment between the couple.
So, even though those moments where our clients are making weird faces aren’t the moments we want to capture, we LOVE them & hype them up when they start to loosen up like this.
Like when Nicole says ‘damn, get it girl!’ and McKenna starts laughing - it captures her true self and gets that money shot.
Then you get more interaction with the two of them laughing. You get her reaction, and then his reaction to her laughing. Which is a great way to add those in-the-moment photos to your gallery.
Giving your couples validation and encouragement
It’s really common at a session to get a couple or person who needs lots of encouragement and validation.
In the webinar you’ll see Andre asking ‘like this?’ Or ‘do you want me to come up here?’
Throughout the session, it's super important to continue giving them just enough information to know what to do, but also giving them the freedom to do what comes naturally to them - so you’re capturing pictures that truly reflect your clients.
In our couples sessions when people ask questions like this we like to say something like ‘whatever feels comfortable, whatever feels natural’. To give them some positive validation but keep it open in terms of how they end up moving or getting into a pose.
In the webinar you’ll notice Nicole continues to validate our couple - ‘bomb! YES! OK! I SEE YOU… keep moving’ even when it’s not totally working to give them that confidence boost to keep moving.
Our clients are often thinking everything they’re doing is wrong. So we need to be their biggest hype to make them feel comfortable in front of the camera and move naturally.
Capturing the steamy moments at your couple’s session
Music plays a big part in creating the mood at your session and can also be used to help direct the vibe throughout.
Whatever song comes on can start to dictate the tone of the next couple of poses.
Creating an awesome session playlist is a great way to capture a variety of poses and help your clients shift naturally from one mood to the next.
In the webinar you can see where our couple get much more comfortable with the camera and start to get a bit more intimate with each other. The key is to let this happen naturally rather than try to push these poses because you couple needs to feel comfortable.
This is where playing off your couple and going with what they’re feeling and doing is super important. Read the room, notice if they're intimate use that, take it and go with it.
And if they're struggling with it, recognizing that it's not naturally happening right now is important too. You can come back to those shots later.
We truly believe that as a photographer, your intuition can be your number one strength that sets you apart from other people. It’s something we cover so heavily in The Posing Course. Really paying attention to the energy and, and what people are giving.
Capturing a variety of shots at your Sessions
A lot of the time people say they really want authentic, in the moment type of photos.
But it's still good to include shots of your couple looking at the camera, and interacting with the camera, whether it's smiling or just drawing their attention towards you. It helps to add some different elements to your gallery (plus we swear these photos always end up being some of their favs)
Within each pose you start to build a mental checklist. You start to think like ‘I've got a lot of this now, I haven't really focused on this person a ton, so I need a bit more of this person.
A really simple way to get lots of variety out of one pose is to have them look at each other, then having one person look at you the other and then switch it around.
And within the same pose you can then capture it from different angles and add variety.
In the webinar you’ll see Nicole step back to shoot a pose from a wider angle so as not to overwhelm them in each pose by being so close. It's really easy as a photographer to get excited about something that looks really great on the back of your camera as you're doing it and to overshoot it.
Getting an equal balance of shots of your couples
How many times have you looked at a gallery and realized there’s way more shots of one person engaged with the image, than the other.
A lot of the time one person will kind of nuzzle into their partner and try to tuck themselves away - particularly if they’re not totally comfortable in front of the camera.
When you notice this happening, joke a little with them, mess around with them and encourage them a little more.
Or you take some more time with the person who is not feeling the most confident to help them feel more comfortable with you and the camera.
Making sure you’re spending time on both of your clients will add a ton more variety to your gallery.
Phrases for posing your couples
In the webinar Nicole prompts McKenna to ‘attack him with kisses’ which might be the kind of phrase you could be tempted to note down and put in your back pocket for your own shoots. But this came from reacting to the mood on the shoot rather than it being something Nicole uses all the time.
She noticed that the pose was starting to feel a little stale and they had done quite a few stoic and intimate feeling shots. It was time to bring the energy back up.
Adding a ton of movement helps to bring the vibe back to a fun playful level really quickly.
We always say that what you’re saying to your couples should come from reacting to what they’re feeling and doing, but it’s also helpful to have some go-to phrases for moments like this. You’ll find a bank of these phrases inside The Posing Course.
Our philosophy for couple’s sessions and wedding photography
Our favorite response to the photos we take is that they feel natural, tell a story and are very in the moment. So many people ask us - ‘how did you get them to laugh like that?’ Or ‘how did you get them into that pose without any awkwardness?’
It all comes as a result of creating a session day experience where our couples can naturally be themselves. So we can photograph them in a way that looks like them and shares their story.
This is what we created The Posing Course to help you achieve.
The webinar we offer for free gives you a taster of our online course on posing which focuses on helping you become the intuitive, creative photographer who can capture those beautiful, natural, in-the-moment shots. Find out more about The Posing Course here.