How to Look Natural in Portrait & Family Photos, From a Yoga Teacher Turned Photographer

I hear the same sentence before almost every session. I'm not photogenic. Or, I never know what to do with my hands.

What people mean is that they don't want to be told to stand still and hold a smile. Nobody looks like themselves doing that. The face that shows up is the one you make for the DMV.

My goal is a photograph that looks like you. Your real smile. The laugh that arrives when someone in your family says the thing only your family finds funny. Getting there is not luck, and it isn't a trait some people have and others don't. It's direction.

I learned how to direct people long before I had a camera in my hand. I taught yoga for more than ten years . Two hundred hours of training, then years of standing at the front of a room full of people who felt awkward in their own bodies and were waiting for me to tell them what to do next.

That turns out to be the entire job of a family photographer.

Here are five things teaching gave me that show up in every session I shoot.

1. Specific cues, not vague ones

In a yoga room, "relax" does nothing. Say it to twenty people and watch nothing change. What works is small and physical. Soften your jaw. Let your shoulders drop away from your ears. Press into the outside edge of your back foot.

The body responds to a precise instruction and ignores a general one. That's not a style preference, it's how attention works.

In a session it sounds like this. Walk toward me and tell her what's for dinner. Put your weight on your back foot. Kiss the top of his head and hold it one second longer than feels normal.

None of those are poses. All of them make one.

There's a reason behind every cue, and most of it is about how a body reads in a frame. Weight on the back foot lengthens your line and drops your shoulders. Chin forward and slightly down defines your jaw. Hands doing something, holding a kid, in a pocket, in your husband's, look easy in a way that hands left hanging never do. Open your chest and you photograph as someone comfortable being there.

So the cue does two jobs at once. It gets you moving, which gets you to a real expression. And it puts your body in the shape that photographs most like you on a very good day.

2. A session has a warm-up

No yoga class opens with the hardest posture. You'd hurt someone. You start easy, you build, you reach the peak in the middle when everybody is warm, then you come down.

A family session runs the same shape. We don't begin with all five of you facing the lens together. We begin with walking, because walking gives everyone a job and nobody has to think about their hands. Then the kids on their own, because they warm up fastest and the adults loosen up just watching them.

The frame you actually came for happens in the middle, once everyone has forgotten I'm there. If I shot it first I'd get five people bracing.

3. The fourth cue is where the photo is

You never cue a pose once and walk away. Getting someone into the shape is the beginning. Then you layer. Root the back heel. Lengthen through the crown of your head. Let the shoulders drop. Turn the ribs open. Each direction takes them a little deeper, and the pose at the end of that sequence looks nothing like the one they arrived in.

A session works exactly the same way, and it's why I keep talking the whole time. The first direction gets you standing in the right place. That's the setup, and if I stopped there you'd freeze and start managing your own face.

So I keep going. Turn your shoulder toward him. Melt your shoulders down your spine. Now look down at her. Now put your forehead against his. Now tell me what she said in the car on the way here.

By the fourth or fifth cue you've stopped thinking about the camera entirely, because you're busy doing the next thing I asked. That's the frame. Not the pose you walked into. The one you got walked into.

4. At least one laugh, every class

I had a rule when I taught. Everybody laughs at least once.

Which sounds odd for a yoga room. People come in serious, they're there to work, and the whole format is quiet. But I never believed the job stopped at the poses. The job was whether you left feeling better than when you walked in, and a laugh is the fastest way to know it's working. It changes a room faster than any cue.

Family photos have the same problem. Everyone's in coordinated outfits, the whole day has been arranged around this, and somewhere around minute four it starts to feel like a task to get through. Serious in, serious out.

So I bring the rule with me. We joke around. The kids get ridiculous. I'm usually ridiculous first, because a real laugh needs something to laugh at and I'd rather it be me than one of your kids.

The other half of the rule is what I leave out. You don't tell a yoga student they're doing it wrong, you offer the next thing to try. Bend your knee. Take the block. Come down whenever you want. Same here. You'll never hear me assess your face. You'll hear shake your hands out, let's go again, or come stand over here where the light is better.

Pressure and a real laugh can't share a room. So I keep the room easy.

5. Reading a room in five seconds

Stand in front of a class enough times and you can scan twenty people and know instantly which one is struggling. You adjust for that person without stopping the class or drawing attention to them.

I do the same thing at a session. The nine-year-old who has decided today is the worst day of her life. The dad who agreed to this and is quietly regretting it. The toddler who is roughly eleven minutes from finished.

I see it early, and I change the plan. We add in movement. We go find a stick. We let the toddler run and shoot that instead, and the picture is better than the one I had planned.

That's the whole thing. Warm, unhurried, and shaped so that the version of you that shows up is the real one. You can see how I think about it on my about page, and what a session includes on services.

Fall dates across Glenview, Wilmette and Winnetka are open now. Book a session, and let me do the directing.