Model & Portrait Posing Guides – Are They Worth It?

Model & portrait posing tutorials and guides are a dime a dozen on the internet from free to paid, but do you really need them?

The answer may have more to do with your stage in development as a photographer. An established photographer with years of experience working with models in a pro or home studio will not benefit much from them. However someone with no or little experience working with models will find these posing guides very useful.

Besides general posing guides for female and male models, there are also those specific to wedding, baby and pet photography. I think the ones that are specific to wedding and baby photos can be more useful than general poses. Mainly because photographers who are getting into those niches usually tend to make more money than those who photograph models in general.

But the question still remains, do you really need these “guides” to help you become a better photographer? Besides the level of your experience, the other aspect may be the cost of these guides. So lets take a look at a few of them.

Paid and Free Posing Guides

This digital posing guide can be downloaded for free or up to .99 cents onto your Kindle edition reader. There are several of these from the same author using different types of models. These are only photos with no other data included. It includes about 70 images/poses, so you can see it’s not a large collection. But for the price of under one dollar, although you might not need it, because it costs so cheap, it won’t hurt you either.

This book of 500 poses may be more useful to most photographers. Again the price may determine if it’s worth getting. If you want the book, it’s about $23, but if you get the digital version and download it to your Kindle reader it’s only about $15.

For free posing guides, the best place to find them is actually the Google Image Search results. There you’ll find dozens of websites offering free images of poses for female models, couples, babies, pets and weddings.

Finally, as a photographer for over 20 years, I’d say that model posing guides can be useful if they don’t cost too much and/or you’re trying to get into a particular type of niche, like portraits or weddings.