Distant Era conducted two Fine Art Costumed Photography and Posing Workshop events at Gen Con 2022. These workshops were specifically for costumed participants, and the objective of each workshop was to build a small, simple playbook of poses for each participant based on the character the subject was portraying.
Posing and standing in front of the camera can feel weird, awkward, and unnatural at first. I feel this when I’m in front of the camera, and many of the people I’ve photographed in the past few years feel the same way. Most of the subjects I work with aren’t professional models, and the beginning of a photo session can be stressful when you’re not sure where or how to stand or what to do with your arms and hands. I was inspired to create this workshop to help costumed performers gain confidence in their poses so that they’d have some notes on what they might do when facing the camera and a few character-inspired directions and ideas they might build from. As in all things, practice makes perfect, and with practice comes confidence.
These workshops were also a means for me to rethink and refine my own directing process from behind the camera. Over the course of the last year photographing The People of Light and Shadow, I’ve mostly relied on the subjects’ natural abilities and sense of play. In sessions with professional models, I gave little direction. In other sessions, I directed from the posing fundamentals I’ve learned from watching other photographers over the years, but I’ve noticed that sometimes when I give direction from one of these posing fundamentals, it doesn’t always fit the model or the shot, and in the moment I haven’t understood why directions that should work sometimes don’t. Building this workshop was an avenue for me to expand my own knowledge.
One of the first things I realized when building the workshop was that much of what I’ve learned about posing has come from watching seasoned glamor, beauty, and fashion photographers who are not only excellent photographers but excellent directors, whereas the nature of the fine art fantastical style portraiture I shoot is a different kind of thing, emphasizing narrative over shape and posture, and in which the same lessons don’t necessarily apply. And yet those beauty and fashion posing fundamentals are the foundation upon one would wish to build—thinking about shape, posture, and elongation—when creating a narrative picture.
So that’s the way I structured the workshop: fundamentals first, then narrative. But making a distinction between those two was key to clarifying my objective in posing subjects in the first place. When I talk about narrative, I’m talking about acting, playing actions and intention, the importance of which was brought home to me by the subjects of The People of Light and Shadow series. Thus the second piece of the Gen Con workshops was a crash course in playing character-specific action. We talked about making shapes; then we discussed playing story. Then we made and played our poses and photographed them, all of this in a two-hour period of time. As we reached the end of each workshop, I wished we had more time to work and play.
The participants did wonderful work in our time together, and it was a great pleasure to do the workshop with them. Here’s a gallery of the final selections from workshop one. Look for the portraits from workshop two in a couple weeks’ time!
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