When photographing a woman standing, there are five key things you can do that will instantly flatter her figure. She will be your client forever if you make her look amazing. It does not matter if you can see her legs because she is wearing a bikini or shorts, or if they are covered by a dress. The position of her legs helps to set up her attitude, and that will give her confidence and help you make a remarkable photograph.

Here are the five key things you can do that will help you with that:

1)    Have her put all her weight on the back leg. The leg that takes the weight goes thick and heavy.  It’s not as attractive as it sounds, so you don’t want that effect to be front and center. With all the weight on the back leg, she becomes stable and can easily position the front leg in a variety of ways. With no weight on the front leg, it will look slender and shapely.

2)    Raise the heel on the front leg. This is especially effective if she is barefoot. It gives the illusion of having a longer leg. It will also give a better shape to her calf. If she pushes down a bit on the toes, this isometric effort will activate her calf muscle, add a little sidelight and the muscle shape pops right out.

3)    Turn her hips away from the camera and her shoulders back to the camera. This creates a shapelier waist illusion. The hips present the thinnest width to the camera while the shoulders present the widest view. This gives the waist a V-shape, creating a fit and curvier female shape. If you place the hands on the waist it projects a very confident image. If she has a bit of a tummy, bring the far hand across the tummy to the pant line – she can hold a purse or something, or if it’s casual have her hold the belt. This hides the tummy while strengthening the V-shape body build form.

4)    Have her place her hands on her waist, not on her hips. This better defines the waist, gives a strong hourglass impression, and can also hid soft rolls or waist issues. If she has a soft tummy be sure she does not push in too far or firmly, as this will often push more of the tummy forward, creating a bulge.

5)    Tilt the camera upwards slightly. This will give the impression that she is taller. Be careful not to go overboard since it will also make her head look smaller if gone too far. When you do this, be mindful of the background. Quite often you will find the head goes above the background top creating a lot of clutter you will have to fix in post production.

The more of these techniques you can incorporate into your pose, the happier your client will be. Remember that the legs are the foundation of the pose. Always start there. Their position will become clues to the viewer as to the mood and attitude the subject has, even if the legs are not in the image.

Master the tricks of leg position and the rest comes relatively easy.

No doubt about it, Dave Cross knows his stuff and has fun with it. As usual, nearly every chair had a bum in it, paying rapt attention to the 20 foot screens. Dave has this great ability to move it along but seem like he is unhurried. The seminar was presented by Kelbytraining.com. The company really knows how to get you into the flow of things; from supporting vendors with great special offers, to a perfect sound system to catch all of Dave’s tips.

One of the more enjoyable perks of the seminar is the workshop booklet, with lots of places for personal notes. The manual, Dave explained, covers every step, every photo he talked about. The package also came with a disc of the original images he used for teaching so the students could experiment with them later.

All ages were in attendance; behind me was a 12 year old boy complete with iPad and Macbook Pro. Further back were some old guys muttering with happy grins.

Lots to grin about. Dave showed some of the magic that is in Photoshop 5. I heard lots of “Well, I like that!” There are some huge leaps forward in this version.

Dave has a book out on Selections. He suggested that he could abridge it and just use the new Photoshop 5 selection tool. His demo of that defined his recommendation, even wispy hairs got snagged.

Being the selection expert, he showed a layers trick to select a tree full of delicate leaves from a background of cloudy blue sky.

Naturally he showed off some of the new flashy tools in Photoshop 5. (I am a reviewer for Adobe Photoshop; I will have a full review article out soon.) Pretty much all he taught was applicable to the other CS versions.

A lot of his instruction was on workflow speedups, all very effective.

These seminars come to Calgary once or twice a year and are very affordable. The next time you hear of it, if you have any interest in Photoshop at all, book a seat.

Surfing the web looking for stories on how portrait photography is being used to impact on self-esteem. Up pops Nina Maniphak, an 18 year old high school senior. She won a grant from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. She won first place in the regional final, earning a $1,500 prize to invest in her presentation vehicle Plum Porcupine Photography.

The twist? “I think [I won] because mine focused on girls and how I wanted to help with their self-esteem and confidence, because I really like that feeling of helping them feel good about themselves,” said Maniphak.

“One of the things the judges were impressed with was that she’s not just selling pictures, she’s selling self-esteem,” said Julie Kantor, vice president of government affairs for the Greater Washington NFTE.

What a grasp of the power of portrait photography. Her specific goal is to reach other teenage girls and empower them with their images. She has found firsthand how life changing the whole photographic experience can be.

I can vouch that she is on the right track. It’s something we see daily in our work. Most women don’t come in declaring, “Empower me!” But they always leave with a new perspective about themselves and comment on that.

It is so cool to see emerging photographers understanding that their images impact people, change them, and enrich them.

This is the video of our still images from the Sport Chek Mother’s Day Run & Walk. I had an amazing team of photographers, one at each key location taking photographs. This video is created using something from everyone’s images.

Fran and I sorted through 6,500 images to distill them down to the 515 images that will be used to promote and tell the Mother’s Day Run story. Please go here to see some of them, posted on our Facebook page.

It is truly an amazing experience. We were the Official Photographer of the run and a major sponsor as well. The weather went from rain, to sleet, to a bit of snow, then finished with sunshine. They ended the event with little legs run at the Plaza. We had two portrait tents setup, and all the monies paid went into the Charity.

You may have seen us, we had special jackets and volunteer shirts made up for the run – green with a big PHOTOGRAPHER across the back.

The event had just over 15,000 participants going the distance, all ages, all speeds.

It was a great event that we were thrilled to be part of.

In Vulcan right now, just about to set things up for the sessions this afternoon. I will be sharing the stage with Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock, as one of the official photographers of the Welcome Home event in the town of Vulcan. It is going to be so much fun, nice blue skies are starting to appear. Ah, life is good!

Wow, we were the official photographer at the Fashion Has No Borders show. Had a studio all setup and everything. Mark also photographed the fashion show, which was amazing. But one of the gems from the whole show was the two performances by Mandie C. She is being polished for great things and this was, I think, her first – or one of her first – stage shows. Great energy, the audience was mesmerized. We created a music video of her show with her music.

Mandie C is a Calgary Singer, she has her first full CD out already, you can find it available at Edges Hair Salon.

Have you tried to enlarge an image from your camera only to have it go all grainy and pixelated? Or sent someone an email with your image attached, only to find out it’s so big they have to scroll around the screen to see it? Bet you have wondered why.

It all has to do with the file size and quality you have your camera set to. In the days of film camera it was never an issue. Film was pretty much the same size for everyone. Digital cameras of today are full of options and default settings.

Every camera has some choice settings for your file size, but each camera maker has a different name for them. It can be confusing, but essentially you have two options that you can change.

You will have an option for image quality. Often you will see an icon representation of the quality. At one end the icon is smooth, and at the other it’s jagged. This relates to the compression level of the image file (usually jpg) with the icon representing what is happening to your file. High quality creates a larger file with fine detail that takes up more space; low quality is a rougher image but saves space.

Then there is image size. Often this is represented by pixel dimensions, so the bigger the dimensions, the larger the image. Obviously, the larger the size, the bigger the image can be enlarged without falling apart. But it will also take up more space on your memory card. You may have noticed that with the small setting you can get 600 or more images, but with the large setting it’s suddenly 20 images to fill your card.

The rule of thumb is to always make your images as large as possible with the best quality. You can shrink the image down with software but you cannot make it larger without pixelation and loss of quality. Remember, though, when you email the image to friends or post it on a social page to shrink it down first. Usually 600 pixels longest side is great. When you send your file to an image site for printing, send the biggest version, even if you are not printing it very large, and it will look better. There will be more detail and better color. Always save your file in a safe place, back it up, and only work on copies of your original file.

Getting all geared for the Fashion Has No Borders event March 20, from 9am to 9pm. We are so excited to be part of this new show to Calgary. We are the Official FHNB Show Photographer and Inner Spirit Photography is a sponsor of the Black Label Zone. The Black Label Zone is where you will find collections from designers at the forefront of fashion. This Zone combines the best of glamour and cool to create the perfect look! Fashion Television icon Jeanne Beker will be flying in to host, with fashion shows running almost back-to-back on the main stage.

I will also be doing fashion shoots in our own huge booth that is 40×20 with a sound system and its own stage, on incredible furniture from Inside Designs, with models in their designer outfits. Collections are coming from Italy and the Caribbean.

Fran is printing up new display images, so it’s going to be a very fresh look. We will have a very large LCD TV screen so you can see what I create. This week we are looking for people to help staff our booth. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Learn more about the Fashion Has No Borders show at the FHNB website. Oh, another great thing about this show? It’s only $9 to come in.

I am a long time Star Trek fan, not quite a trekker but do enjoy my sci-fi. So to join Mason Dodds in the photography of Leonard Nemoy’s Vulcan, Alberta visit this April is exciting. Most of the event we will be jostling shoulders with a crowd of accredited photographers, I am sure. However, only Mason and I will be in the hour and half High Tea event with 50 ticket holders.

Did you know Leonard has been doing photography for about 40 years? He studied photography at UCLA in the ’70s. Somewhere along that timeline it became a profession with the nude as the focus. He has books and limited edition prints, all very interesting images.

He remains very active in the nude photography fine art field. It fascinated me that his nude work is in an impressive number of museum collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Judah L. Magnes Museum, The LA County Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum of NY, The New Orleans Museum of Fine Art and The Hammer Museum.

This summer to fall (2010) his most current photographic collections will be presented at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with R.Michelson Galleries. It opens July 31, 2010.

So for me, I am more fascinated that this photographic artist is who we will be photographing in April, than I am that it’s Mr. Spock in virtually his hometown.

You can visit his website of work at Leonardnimoyphotography.com. It is really worth the visit.

Been meaning to make this for some time, a gray cube. It sounds odd I know but I kept coming across this very simple setup, the cube in the middle of a seamless background. A model doing clean lined body shape poses in rich black and white. Soft lighting that revealed form and shape. Almost spiritual, very airy, it is perfect for black and white.

So now I have one, thanks to my friend Dave and Colette who asked for it.

Dave because, well, he is handy, figured out in a few moments on the phone everything I would need including the cut sizes of the wood, and then in a half hour with me, we had it assembled. Jan is painting it today.

Colette because of asking, she sent over a sheet of ideas with a cube. “Can we do this?”

Now it’s drying. It’s going to be fun.