by mehmet eygi | rocky nook | 336 pages
price: $39.95
rockynook.com

In an already saturated field of recent books, blogs, tutorials and workshops all competing to be the last word on the art of posing a subject, there’s a new contender to the title—POSE!—and it might just have captured the prize. One reason is suggested by the subtitle: 1,000 Poses For Photographers and Models. The book is, in effect, an encyclopedia of this often-enigmatic phase of the portraitist’s craft. But it’s not merely a catalogue of useful posing suggestions; it’s a comprehensive, meticulously detailed and illustrated reference work for every serious shooter.

Author Mehmet Eygi, a photographer and creative director based in Cologne, Germany, works as a consultant to international photo studios, and he’s identified broad discrepancies among the posing skills of the photographers he observes. To lift everyone up a few notches in this partly scientific, partly intuitive specialty, he’s created a copious range of posing scenarios, each photographed simply, distraction-free on a plain background. The subjects are professional models, all of them clearly sensitive to the nuances of minute changes in expression and body posture.

The book is organized as a series of both linked and standalone modules. Each of these showcase a specific posing idea along with a detailed explanation of how it, along with its various permutations, supports a theme or a given subject. Under the broad category, “Women,” for instance, you’ll find a subset labeled “Business,” and within that, annotated illustrations of moments like “Sitting Casually,” “Sitting Straight,” every one of them supported by variations—things like establishing an off-camera line-of-sight using eyeglasses for effect, communicating authority or approachability. Eygi tunes your senses to all the individual details that combine into an assertive pose, and every key image is overlaid with callouts that emphasize features like “fingertips turned outward,” “one leg in front of the other,” “feet to the front.”

POSE! naturally targets portrait photographers with its message, but the book is intentionally a resource for subjects as well. Not just models or actors, but as an idea library for amateur portrait subjects who might need a nudge toward overcoming a feeling of awkwardness in front of the camera. Eygi’s broad-brush approach reaches these readers as well, dealing beautifully with common, usually unspoken questions like, “What am I supposed to do with my hands?” and “Can you please make me look slimmer?”

We’ve all seen, most likely, how an otherwise inspired portrait moment can easily be ambushed by an uninspired pose. Eygi’s book is a powerful antidote to that.

Related: How to Shoot Great Portrait Photos: Advice from Tamara Lackey

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