Jeff Smith's Posing Techniques for Location Portrait Photography

Clearly the author has considerable knowledge in his domain. What the book is lacking though is high quality instructional text.This book is probably most helpful for an experienced, but early career photographer who is looking how someone else is doing things just to mix things up, expand on breadth.For someone who has not gotten any other instruction on posing, the descriptions will fall well short of anything that can be reproduced in a repeatable and predicable fashion. It doesn't have enough detail, doesn't explain enough of the why/how.And for the seasoned pro, there is not enough new stuff in here to make it worth the read.The style of writing is much more of a pro sitting down on the porch over a drink comparing notes with someone else, than someone trying to explain how something works from the ground up.In terms of photo books, it's like showing a photo, the lighting diagram, but not explaining why those lights were placed there. Lots of those books around as well.Would I have picked it up from a book store? Maybe. Would I buy it again? Probably not. Did I expect more than it delivered? Definitely.

I received my order yesterday and started to read this book. I couldn't put it down. It had so many points I would have never considered, and wouldn't have guessed that would matter to a woman. For example, ankles are about the only thing I never notice on a woman, but they do. I would have thought leaning a person up against a rock for example would be a great shot, well, not exactly. Mr. Smith covers nearly everything from the tilt of the head to how the toes should be positioned. Also another thing is how to creatively hide areas of a person that are going to make an otherwise great shot into a reject. Great pictures of women, guys and families. He certainly brings out the beauty of the gals in his poses. (I must say though that with most of these gals, making them look good is not too hard.) Well worth the price. Amazon delivered in about 4 days. Ric.

While text in this book is useful at times, but you can get pretty much same stuff from most of "Posing techniques" (including brilliant books by Gomez on glamour photography) books out there (including few very good ones). There is VERY little specifics about on location posing, which book supposed to be about. Couple of chapters on how to sell your work - dont even understand why they were added, apart from making up for volume. Most of images in book are pretty mediocre, and like 70% of them reminds you of what person who just learned how to apply gaussian blur in Photoshop to smooth skin and make Orton's effect would be keep doing out of sheer excitement (and i kid you not. Image on the cover is one of very few good ones).On the whole - very few good tips and loads of repetition of other books. And very few good shots , which actually looks professional (sorry for repeating this, but its kind of strikes me. I never saw such a horrible stuff before in a book that pretends to teach people)

a very good book with lost of ideas to encourage you to better things. Explained clearly and good example photos to se it in real life

Advanced amateur or professional photographers may get bored by this book, but newcomers to model photography, I do not know if I use the correct term, this book is excellent. Reading, understanding, and applying positively affect my photos right away.I personally was having problem in getting the right pose for model, especially full body. I have never felt good with the composition. I guess it was because the shape of human body is different from normal photo frame.The way Jeff describes things are is excellent. Not so much of hard chewed theory. Practical approach with a small but make sense backgrounds makes me focus into trying to apply his lessons right away.

Lots of great posing ideas. You can't go wrong with this publication. It will inspire you to come up with other poses.

This book is reasonably well written, but I found that the photos in the book didn't match what the words were saying. The author would tell you to do one thing and then the example photo would break the rule that was just given. Anyway, it did help me with posing a little better, but it could have been better.

One of the best posing / modeling books I've read

Les modèles ont l'air stressés et/ou non naturels....sauf celle sur la couverture!J'ai remarqué sur plusieurs "erreurs" sur les photos telles que: mauvaise position des mains, doigts collés, bras croisés ou poing fermé chez une femme...ouf ! Sujet centré, éclairage ordinaire, vêtement hors contexte avec l'environnement (en complet ou talon haut dans la foret!), yeux fermés ou mal éclairés. Aucune information technique sur les prises de vues.Vous voulez un bon livre...."The Portrait Photographer's Guide to Posing" de Bill Hurter