Portrait question for the pros

[guitarman]

My aim is to work a part time gig doing portraits after taking maybe the next 2 or 3 years to develop. I always like to have a hobby that I can have to fill my creative needs. Right now its playing music in a band> I used to do that for a living and when I got in to IT I went to part time. I would eventually like to give it up altogether and do part time photography. I would be happy just to make enough to subsidize my equipment.
So from time to time I will be asking relevant questions to help realize those goals.
My first question is, lately I've been practicing on my wife. I'd like to get some real decent shots for display in our home and its great experience to learn. From the recent poses I have had her do she seems to be more at ease when she does her own thing than when directed by me. She has given me the best poses when its her own. This is more than likely due to my lack of expereince at conveying across what I want. Sometimes I have a vision of how I'd like the shot to go but maybe my communication of that is flawed. What I would like to know from the pros is, do your models have a lot of free reign in how they pose for the shot or do you quite strictly direct them in how the look is to be. I feel that this is my next hurdle to start overcoming.

[Longwatcher]

Depends a lot on the model.
Some of them need very little direction
Some of them take very little direction, whether they need it or not
Some need lots of direction
The majority of models I have experienced need some occasional direction, with frequency based on their experience.

I have never had a model that could go 100% without some direction (if I wanted the look I wanted), but I had one model that I had to almost position her body physically myself for every shot that was slightly annoying. I prefer models who mostly direct themselves but that don't mind my telling them what I need and my making small corrections to the basic pose. I prefer saying 'hold that' to saying "put your arm there and your leg/foot here".

In some examples from this past Saturday and Sunday. Saturday's model needed a lot of guidance, but as a first time model with no practical experience I expected this. On the good side her posture was mostly good and she understood the purpose of the direction.
Sunday's model was fairly experienced and I only needed to give general guidance most of the time, with only a few occasions of tweaking her position to get the best look.
I do remember one model this past year that was almost telepathic. I suspect she was reading body language unconsciously, but she would change position just before I would open my mouth to tell her to try something else. About half the time it was to the position I had in my mind (or close enough) for her to go to next. Now that is a good model.

I reccommend getting a good book showing different poses for models. If you are like me you will use it when you have a mental block. I look at it, decide it is all useless drivel and throw it over my back (ensuring it won't hit anything vital in the process) as something comes to mind which wasn't even close to what I turned to in the book.

The other thing I did, before they changed the code on the site to make it more difficult was to copy any image on OMP that had a good pose that I liked and then I would review them every once in a while so as to learn when that pose seems to work.

I still need improvement on my model positioning, but I now have a fairly good idea of what isn't working for a particualr model. This comes from a combination of all above and experience.

Just my experience,

[guitarman]

Thanks for your comments. Do you know of any resources, Internet, books, etc, that outline the basic concepts?

[NGrinerPhoto]

a great basic book is Photography by Bruce Warren

[Lotto]

Very helpful model pose pocket book

http://www.photocrack.com/pages/down...delPose15.html