How to look your best in photographs – practice!
Professional athletes train to become better at running, newscasters train their voices to be more audibly pleasing, so why shouldn’t you practice your appearance? Most of you are probably thinking that sounds vain. Well, hiring a photographer to take photos of either yourself or your family is absolutely the time to be vain. Embrace it. If you’re going to be the subject of the photographs – photographs that you hopefully intend to keep for a long time – then you want to look amazing. Contrary to what some may think, models don’t look phenomenal in photographs on accident. That takes a lot of planning and practice – for everyone involved! There is a lot of thought put into how a subject looks on camera.
If you want to bring your best to the camera, get some practice in. Find a mirror, and let your vanity run rampant. Make different faces, pay attention to your limbs and figure out which side is actually your good side. You may discover that you actually like the way you look with a slight smirk, rather than a big smile. Regardless, don’t allow yourself to feel silly or think this is a stupid idea! Trust me that you’ll feel a lot worse if time and money are spent on photos, and then you hate all of them because you forgot how smiling works.
During the shoot, your photographer will be guiding and helping you pose, but you’ll be ahead of the game and get more out of your photoshoot if you already know how certain facial expressions and poses look. An important part of this process is remembering what your body or face felt like when it was in a visually-pleasing pose (aka you looked like a complete rockstar). You won’t have a mirror to constantly look into during your shoot, so you’ll have to use muscle memory to recreate your favorite looks and expressions. If you put in the practice, it’ll come back to you quickly and you’ll look comfortable in front of the camera.
Above all, have fun with it and don’t take yourself too seriously. Being reserved and afraid to cut loose will result in stiff pictures. If you just go for it and aren’t afraid of feeling a little goofy sometimes, you’ll be more relaxed and natural in your photos. So get a little weird and make faces at yourself in the mirror, you’ll thank your good side later 😉