Today, I'm going to teach you five things to avoid while posing hands.

We all know that posing is difficult, but it's even more difficult to pose hands. What I want to talk about is five things that I look for when I'm posing my subjects, specifically focusing on the detail of hands because what will happen is the entire pose will be perfect, but then the hand is a little bit off and that's all you can see.

👉 Palm turned too much toward camera

The first problem that I try to avoid while posing hand is having the palm turned too much towards camera. The inside of your hand, it's large, it's bright, it's distracting. And the general rule when posing hands is you usually want to have the pinky side of the hand towards camera. This is not something 100 percent of the time, but most of the time, and this is because it is a much more elegant, smooth line. So when I am posing my subjects and their hand is turned a little bit too much with the palm towards camera, I simply have them rotate their hand away.


👉 Avoid tense fingers

When people are nervous or they're stressed, they show their tension in their hands and you don't want that to be communicated through your photograph. What I'm talking about is the hands balled in fists, or maybe they're kind of digging with their their fingers or the fingers or a little bit too rigid. It looks very robotic. So what I'll do is I'll look for that detail and then I'll coach my subjects in a way that relaxes those fingers and it gives a much more confident, relaxed look to the entire photograph.

👉 Pressure on the Face

The next thing that I try to avoid while posing hands is having the hands dig into the body too much Specifically, I'm focused more on the face. If I tell someone to put their hand on their hip, a lot of times they'll dig the fingers in and it's not flattering, so I'll have them touch much more softly. Now a very common pose is to have a subject placed their face into their hand, but without direction. People often put too much weight on their hand, and the fingers start to dig into the skin, and the results aren't flattering.

Instead of her actually placing her head in her hands, what I'm going to do is have her barely caress, barely touch the side of her face with the hand. I can get a similar position without those distractions

👉 Stray Fingers

What I mean by that is I don't want a thumb jutting out or a pinky. It really breaks up the smooth lines of the hands and it becomes a visual distraction. Instead, what I want to do is have the subject tuck her thumb beside the index finger. I would do the same thing maybe if the pinky were jutting out would have her make it create a smoother line next to the rest of the fingers. And a lot of times this has to do with just relaxing and replacing the hands.

👉 Abrupt wrists or foreshortening

The last thing that I try to avoid while posing hands is ill posed wrists. If the wrist is too much at a right angle, it looks awkward. It's not a pretty line and it looks very robotic. The other thing I try to avoid related to this is something called foreshortening. Foreshortening happens when anything is coming directly to or away from camera. So if the wrist is bent in the hand, it turn towards the body. It looks cut off. Same thing if it's pointed towards the camera. So instead, I like to have longer lines, smoother lines to the bend of the rest. In fact, actually bending the wrist up is usually more elegant, but you can also bend the wrist down slightly just to avoid those right angles, and then you usually want the pinky side of the hand towards camera instead of having the fingers pointed back towards the subject.

What I recommend is to get the overall pose right and then check for the detail of the hands because if the hands aren't right, the entire pose won't look right.

If you've found this video helpful, I have an entire posing series dedicated to the ins and outs and the essentials of posing any subject.

Leave a comment below if you found these tips helpful and if you've thought about posing your subject's hands! 😃

✅ Posing Series: [ Ссылка ]
✅ Posing Cards: [ Ссылка ]


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