Fine Art Female Figure Photography

If you’re a keen amateur photographer and you want to start doing fine art photography with female figures, you might be wondering where to start. If this is you, there are a number of suggestions that might help to get your creative juices flowing.

The first idea is to consider approaching your fine art female figure photography as if it’s sculpture rather than photography. Think about what sort of sculpture you would create if you were a sculptor, and then work out how you can get your model into a similar pose. This will free up your creativity, as you’ll naturally think about inanimate sculpture in a less constricted way than you would think about a living, breathing, human model.

Along these lines, a trip to an art gallery that has a sculpture collection will give you plenty of inspiration for your fine art female figure photography. Best of all, sculpture is three-dimensional by definition, so you’ll be able to work around it the sculptures and see how they look from different angles. Pay particular attention to angles, such as the angle between the head and closest shoulder of the sculpture. A lot of good photography has its roots in art forms that were invented long before photography (most notably painting), and this sculpture approach is in line with this – so embrace it!

Another good idea is to acquire a jointed, poseable human figure (you can get these from all good art shops) and use this to test and try out ideas for poses which you can then ask your human model to replicate. Again, this will help you to think outside the box, which you might not do so readily with a real human model in front of you.

The third idea is to experiment with lighting in miniature. You can use any reasonably-sized toy figure for this, such as a doll or teddy bear. For lights you can use 2-3 simple desk lamps (make sure they have bright bulbs). Experiment with lighting the toy figure with the lamps and see what results you get. You can also photograph different lighting schemes to see how they will look once in-camera. This is a great way to save time when you start shooting with a real model as you’ll already have ideas of lighting schemes to use.