Posing with a strut

To put people at ease, Charlotte “Ginger” DiNunzio asks her subjects to walk into the frame for her, like they are on a runway.

“It makes people forget about the camera,” she says. “They’re just walking and having a nice time, and they’re just themselves. It makes the picture more dynamic.”

I recently met up with DiNunzio, a Central California coast (Los Oso) based photographer, when she appeared on the Photowalks travel photography series on YouTube. Here, she demonstrated several of her favorite posing techniques.

Arms and hands

In the posing episode, DiNunzio talked about what subjects can do with those arms and hands.

“I feel like people don’t know what to do with them,” she says. “So I tell people to raise their hands and arms and let them fall back down, because that’s you. I often have people roll their shoulders and close their eyes for a breath, and when they open their eyes, their face is relaxed. It’s funny how our faces change just because we have a camera focused on us.”

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Shake out our sillies, however, and we come alive.

I’ve seen it happen too many times. A family will be all stiff at a photo shoot, then when I announce it’s over, they walk over to a photo booth, put on a funny hat, and then get all zany and animated for the camera. Anything we can do to relax our clients before our cameras roll is a good thing.

DiNunzio’s latest book, “Ginger Snaps: A Photographic Exploration of Redheads” was released in November. You can watch the complete Photowalks episode, which takes place in the Los Angeles seaside suburb of Manhattan Beach, below.