Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
The Unposed Field Guide is one of the first couples portrait posing guides we came across. Early in our career as photographers, outside of upgrading our equipment, the one area that needed to see significant improvement was in how we handled posing our clients. As we’ve really refined our approach to posing and photography style throughout the years, we’ve come to realize that this is one of the most critical selling points for any photographer.
A photographers approach to posing sets the stage for the entire shoot. It tells the client whether this experience is going to feel like a chore, or be something fun to participate in.
The spirit of “unposed” portrait photography can be summarized in the popular term in photo circles: candid. The very essence of The Unposed Field Guide is then to start with a simple mental shift away from the forced posing you might see in wedding photos from a few decades ago. This ideal is put into practice by the use of verbal prompts instead of stiff posing. This gets your client engaging with you, and if a couple or family, with each other.
In this review, we’re going to talk about The Unposed Field Guide as both a product and a larger philosophical shift. To do this, we’re going to talk about our experience putting it to use to shoot our couples.
What You Get With Your Purchase
At the steep price tag of $100 (or $175 for both the Couple and Family editions), we invested our own money into The Unposed Field Guide because we wanted to use it as an educational tool we could apply to our future shoots. It was easy enough for us to buy because, as a photography business, we simply write the purchase off on our taxes. Admittedly, for your average photographer, the guide is pretty pricey. We will talk more about the cost-to-value ratio throughout this review.
The actual guide comes in physical format only. The guide itself is quite nice with the prompts printed on cards, and including a key ring to bind them together. In practice, the guide is a little too large to really be practical to use on shoots for paying clients – we generally resort to keeping it in our car to review between locations. A smaller product in this case might have benefited us more for the purpose of quick reviewing on the spot, but it’s not a deal breaker either.
The Unposed Field Guide includes a number of prompts spanning a range of emotions you are looking to elicit. Generally, these prompts are good – though there are some that feel like filler content, and a few others that are far too long to be easy to memorize and apply. This is another area where it’s not a hard “issue,” but no doubt if some of these prompts are useless to us…the value proposition goes down pretty fast.
Outside of the prompts themselves, you also receive access to private Unposed Facebook Group. This is a private group for users of the guide to discuss, create new prompts, share photos, etc.. In theory this is a cool tool to collaborate with other people, but in practice it’s not very active. It’s also limited by the Facebook infrastructure if you happen to not care to be signed up there.
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How We Have Used The Unposed Field Guide
The Unposed Field Guide was our first exposure to the world of candid prompt-based photography 2 years ago now. We ordered it up after just a few engagement sessions with new clients, and have applied it’s prompts and, even more, the supporting mindset to our photography since.
To date we’ve held over 100 shoots spanning solo portraits, couple’s photography, weddings, families…In our experience, we’ve come to realize there really is room for this “unposed” style of posing anytime you are interacting with another person. Compared with traditional posing, it really is our preferred way to get the shots we need (and what our clients want).
You may be starting to notice we keep talking about the mindset switch that occurred in us more than the included prompts themselves. This is because our use of The Unposed Field Guide only started with us glued to the prompt cards. Eventually, we started to learn a handful and secured them in our memory as “go to” prompts. The ones that really resonated with us are in our minds now, while the others have been put away along with the cards themselves.
In a lot of ways, the prompt cards are really much like purchasing a book. You buy it, read it, and eventually don’t have to touch it again. Once you’ve received as much value from it as possible, it becomes pretty useless.
The Unposed Field Guide sets the stage for a larger world of prompt-based posing. The prompts included only go so far, and ideally you’ll end up making up your own as you go along.
Example Shots Using Prompts from The Unposed Field Guide
Given all these shoots we’ve done with this as a guide for much of the posing we have done, it’s easy to share images we have created where this was put to use. Ultimately, this is the area that matters most – and it can seal the deal whether this was a good purchase or not.
For us, our images have progressed and have become really great. This is our personal feeling meshed with feedback we’ve received from our clients, other vendors, publications we’ve been published in, and random commenters on our Instagram. While there are a lot of components that make for a great image such as lighting, quality equipment, and so on – getting posing right is a huge (HUGE) part of this creation process.
See our work below:
Is It Worth It?
We have mixed feelings about The Unposed Field Guide.
These days, sales of prompts are a photographers best friend, and our experience with the specific prompts included here was pretty “meh.” Don’t get us wrong, there are some great ones in there that we continue to use again and again, but there are enough others that are too long or uninspiring. We get that with this sort of thing we wouldn’t jive just based on personal differences, but practically speaking we’ve only cared to use about 25% of the prompts included here.
Our thoughts would likely be more offset if the purchase price wasn’t so high. For a handful of prompts and a supporting mindset, it isn’t really worth $100 dollars. These days, some of the prompts (and more) can be found online (such as on Pinterest), while the mindset of prompt-based posing is talked about on photography forums and websites again and again.
Ultimately, we wouldn’t buy it again, but we also appreciate what it’s offered us and how it’s contributed to our photography posing. If you’re new to this style of posing, it’s an okay introduction.
As an alternative posing guide that we found to be more useful (filled with more applicable prompts) and more cost effective, check out Signature Edit’s The Couples Candid Posing Guide.