Family portrait poses

The family portrait poses that work all do three things: they put people at different distances from the camera instead of in a line, they let bodies touch, and they keep every face fully visible. Below are twelve poses for two to six people, what each one needs to look right, and how to get the hardest of them — the stacked pose — without a camera at all.

Most family photos are not posed badly so much as not posed at all. People stand where they happen to be, at the same distance from the lens, with a hand's width of air between them. Every pose below is a way of fixing one of those three things.

Depth, not a line. A row of people all the same distance from the camera reads as a school photograph. Put some people further back than others and the group gains a shape — a diagonal, a triangle, a stack — and a shape is what makes a picture look composed rather than assembled.

Contact, not gaps. Families instinctively stand about a hand's width too far apart, and that gap reads in the picture as distance between the people in it. Overlap shoulders. Put a hand on an arm. Let a small child lean.

Every face visible. No head hidden behind another, nobody turned away, no hair across a face. A pose that hides one face has failed, however good it looks otherwise.

One more rule is about the camera, not the people: hold it at roughly the height of the middle person's face. Shooting down from above a standing adult's head shrinks the children and shows everyone the top of their own forehead.

One person directly behind the other, the taller at the back, the front person's head just below the back person's chin. It is the simplest version of the stacked pose described below, and a flattering one for a couple, because both faces sit close together in a vertical frame with nothing between them.

Side by side, turned slightly toward each other, heads tilted in until temples or cheeks nearly touch. It works for a parent and an adult child as well as a couple. The thing to watch is the chin: both people should tilt the head, not drop it.

Walking toward the camera, holding hands or with an arm around a waist, looking at each other rather than the lens. It is the pose for people who cannot stand still for a posed picture, and it produces more natural expressions than any posed alternative. Shoot in bursts and pick the frame where both feet are not mid-stride.

The parent standing, children in front of them in height order, the parent's hands on the children's shoulders. It shows the relationship without anyone having to act it, and it is forgiving: if one child moves, the picture still works.

The parent seated — on steps, a bench, the floor — with the smallest child on their lap and any older children standing beside or behind. Seating the adult brings their face down to the children's height, which is the whole trick: faces at similar heights read as close.

A baby held at the front of the group, closest to the camera, with everyone else behind. Hold the baby facing outward against the chest rather than lying across the arms, so the face is upright and visible.

Tallest at the back on one side, stepping forward and down to the smallest at the front on the other. It is the default arrangement for a reason: the line of faces gives the eye a path through the picture, and no face is behind another.

Two rows — one seated on steps, a bench or a sofa, one standing behind — with the people in the back row standing in the gaps between the heads in front, not directly behind them. This is the pose that keeps a group of six from turning into a queue.

Everyone's arms around everyone, heads in, closer than feels natural. It is the warmest of the group poses and the easiest to direct: just say "closer" three times. Its weakness is that people at the edges tend to turn their faces inward, so check that every face is still visible.

Grandparents at the back, parents in the middle, children at the front. Ordering by age rather than height reads as deliberate — anyone looking at it understands the structure without being told.

Ask a child to whisper something into a parent's ear — anything, a joke, a silly word. The parent's reaction is real, the child's grin is real, and for a few seconds nobody is posing. Shoot continuously.

Everyone lying on their backs on a rug or the grass, heads touching in the middle, photographed from directly above. Small children treat it as a game rather than a photograph, which is exactly why it works.

The stacked pose is the one in most of the pictures on this page: everybody in a single vertical file, one behind another, tallest and oldest at the back and youngest at the front, so the faces form a column down the frame. It fits a phone screen, it shows the relationships at a glance, and it is very hard to get with a camera. There are four specific reasons.

The heads have to line up exactly. For the faces to form a column without hiding each other, each person needs their head at a precise height — so the people at the front kneel, crouch or sit while the people at the back stand, and anyone who leans a few centimetres to the side covers somebody else's face. Holding that for more than a few seconds is uncomfortable, and it shows.

Perspective makes the front person too big. The person at the front is the closest to the lens, so at normal distances they look far larger than the person at the back. Photographers fix this by standing further away and using a longer lens, which compresses the depth. Most phones' main camera is a wide lens — around 24 to 26 mm equivalent — which exaggerates the difference.

The light falls off front to back. With a single lamp or a window as the light, the person nearest it is noticeably brighter than the person furthest from it; from a small light source, twice the distance means a quarter of the light. A studio evens this out with several lights. At home, the back of the stack ends up in shadow.

Focus, on a real camera. With a large-sensor camera at a wide aperture, a face at the front and a face a metre behind it cannot both be sharp, so you have to stop down to around f/8 or f/11 — which needs even more light. Phones have so much depth of field that this one is rarely a problem for them; the other three are.

And then everyone has to have a good expression in the same frame, which, with five people including a toddler, is its own small miracle.

The stacked pose does not have to be shot as a stacked pose. The arrangement, the backdrop and the light can all be rebuilt from an ordinary photograph in which everyone is simply standing together.

What the source photograph needs is not a pose. It needs every face visible and turned roughly toward the camera, reasonable light on those faces, between two and six people, and enough resolution that faces are more than a few hundred pixels across. Which photo works best goes through exactly what succeeds and what cannot be recovered.

Graydrop does this: one photo in, one 9:16 monochrome portrait back in about three minutes, $12.99, and you see the finished portrait watermarked before you decide whether to buy it — see a black and white family portrait from a photo. In December there is a Christmas version of the same portrait, with Santa hats as the only color.

• —Everyone the same distance from the camera. It is what makes a group look flat.
• —Gaps between people. Closer than feels natural is about right.
• —The camera too high. Hold it at the middle person's face height, not above everyone's heads.
• —Hands with nothing to do. Arms hanging straight look stiff. A hand on a shoulder, in a pocket or holding another hand fixes it.
• —A hidden face. Check every face before you take the picture, not after.
• —Holding a pose too long. Expressions stiffen quickly. Pose, shoot a burst, relax, repeat.