Dance Poses in Wedding Photography

If our married couple is willing, we will often have them go into dance type poses for their wedding photography session. This simply involves placing the SF City Hall couple in dancing poses and having them try different (and simple) positions. In the image above we asked the groom to dip the bride slightly on the second floor of San Francisco city hall. We coached the groom on how to handle this in a safe and comfortable manner. We never push our married couples into anything they are not comfortable with. We do occasionally get couples who only want to do simple poses. In this particular case, the couple really went for it and dipped far beyond what we asked for. That works too! Then sometimes we end up with a bride and groom who are actually dancers or at the very least take ball room dancing lessons. When that happens, we let the couple take the lead! They can tell us more about what they are capable of doing then we can. This is when it gets fun with regard to dance poses. We just need to be ready with our cameras to capture the action.

Posing Techniques For City Hall Wedding Photography

We talk a lot about posing throughout our website, but never really go into detail regarding how we really do it. There are a great many ways to show a couple how to pose and we have found that different techniques work better for certain couples while others might benefit from another approach. The best wedding photographers can figure out how to help their newlyweds work with them to obtain the desired poses. This will lead to a better result and one that the couple will like better. I am going to create a list below of some of the most basic techniques and their benefits:

• Tell the couple the pose that you want them to do in a simple yet detailed manner. Benefit: Many clients prefer verbal instructions because this is what they are used to and can understand. This is probably our most common way of posing. It works with most couples, but not all.
• Mirroring the pose by actually displaying the ways we want their arms and legs positioned. Lilly often helps me with this one. Benefit: This technique works best with international couples when their is a slight language barrier. Also many people are more visual and prefer this type of instruction. This is only necessary with certain couples.
• Touching the couple and moving their arms/legs/heads in place. Benefit: This technique is less used these days because of Covid-19 concerns, but honestly is a very fast and effective way of posing SF City Hall brides and grooms. In case you are wondering, we always ask before touching. In addition, we are usually wearing our masks and are fully vaccinated.
• Combination of the 3 above. Benefit: This is also a pretty effective way of helping our couple pose. We just use whatever technique works best for each couple and specific pose. The more complex the pose, the more we may use the "Combination method". The idea is to make it as easy as possible for the bride and groom to understand what we want. In addition, it gives our couple a chance to provide us feedback on what works for them and what types of things they would like to do.