Photographing Women: 1,000 Poses

"Photographing Women: 1,000 Poses" is an excellent reference to use as a starting point for getting interesting poses out of a female model during a controlled shoot. The focus is on fashion-style shots, so the models are all beautiful and skinny, this isn't a book about making average-looking people look good.The book starts with a short section on technical aspects of fashion shooting: lighting, makeup, and retouching, which are critically important to this type of picture, and although this book is primarily about posing, I like how the author tries to make it clear in the beginning that posing isn't the only important thing, and a good understanding of these other issues is going to be necessary to create similar pictures.Some posing books are just bland collections of a few average models showing assortments of uninspired looks that seem like they were shot over a weekend in front of the same piece of seamless. This book contains many, many great shots of different models in different locations taken by different photographers, some very well known. The production levels are very high, and most of the finished photos are awesome. The author himself took some of the photos, and for these shots he includes rejected images from the shoot as well as the final shot, with commentary on why he rejected some of the pictures, with reasoning like "bad hand position", "unbalanced composition", etc, I found this to be very useful. There are lighting diagrams provided for the author's own photos, but I notice the lighting in these shots tends to be quite simple with one high frontal light and one background light, so this isn't really a lighting tutorial.I agree with an earlier review that this book would be much more useful as an iPad app where I could quickly find the pose I want. There is an iPad version of this book, but it's just an iBook, not an app, I downloaded the preview version and it seemed to have some formatting issues and wasn't as useful as the printed version. Anyway, this book is a large, somewhat heavy hardcover, so it's just not convenient to carry around on location, and it looks somewhat amateurish to be flipping through a book like this in front of a model. I would appreciate the coolness factor of just showing her on the iPad what I want.So I'm giving this book 5 stars for its great advice, high production values, huge selection of poses, and reasoned arguments for why to use particular poses. I'll be trying some of them at my next shoot!

Chapter 1 of this book re: the "Technical Know-How" was the best, brief, graphic presentation of the basics of portraiture photography I have seen. It's Chapter 2, "The Poses" that most intrigued me. While some might view this extensive presentation of poses as mere changing of angles in capturing portraits, I discovered it instructing me as to story telling, that is, shooting high, medium, low, varying the lighting, the different expressions of the models and the way they held themselves, each conveyed a different message. This was not something I expected. I discovered in this book an excellent instruction manual of body language communication in photos. Having said that, I must also note that this is not a "fine art" book by which one may impress his or her friends on the coffee table. While the production of the pictures is very good, it does not rate an excellent reproduction quality which would also have upped the price significantly. This book is not only what it set out to be, "a handy reference guide to intelligent posing," but also a photographer's guide to communicative photography.

Wonderful book for the photographer, professional or amateur alike. There is no more interesting subject than women, and this book focusses on the many ways to bring out there beauty in your photography. Not only are there many great poses to look at and consider, the book starts from a technical aspect, showing you the set ups. Then it shows a number of poses and their pros and cons. Finally, you can see the best shot and how they arrived at it.Part of the book is shots and discussion by famous professional photographers. I find this part very interesting because you can see where the style of the photographer makes such a big difference. If you didn't realize how important it is for a photographer to bring out the best of their subject, this book will show you. It's clear from reading this book why even the best professional models like working with a creative, knowledgeable photographer.What a great book!

You can't read a book or just take a class and know everything. You have to assist in this industry, but this book will help you understand all the pieces you need to put on a fashion production.The book will teach you not only the poses that will give you an editorial look but will walk you through makeup and hair.Additionally there are a ton of inspirational images from a lot of top photographer around the world.

If you want the best this is it! I have spent a lot of money on similar books and have not been very pleased with what I have purchased. Save yourself some money and disapointment and buy this book. I liked it so much I purchased the hard back book and also the kindle version for my I-pad. I have to protect this book from the Models I work with because they keep trying to walk off with it. Actually someone did and now I am going to purchase it again. For the money this is an excellent investment and I will open your eyes to greatt poses by some wonderful Models and some great Photographers. Believe me this book is by far the best when it comes to poses. I am a picky person and usually don't give praise to purchases because I always feel like they are over priced for what you get but this book is top shelf. The Kindle version is not bad but like most eletronic books I find the flow broken up and sometimes the pictures are displayed then the captions follow on another page. I can live with that. The hard back book is the way to go, I can't say enough good things about it. Very well done.