Arms

Including arms in a shot can be a problem, so some people just give the advise to not include them… well that’s too easy.
Let’s look at some tips that I often share during the workshops.

Images are shot with a Beautydish with grid and the Lensbaby 80mm tilt lens.

In my opinion you always should try to include both arms.
In this shot I only included one, and although I like the shot… well there’s something missing.
Also her elbow is on the absolute limit of what I find acceptable, if she would have moved it a bit more towards the left (image left) you would not see the upper arm and that gives a “weird” effect for me. Now I also have to add that all these rules are great, but if you “hit” that perfect image and the arm is a bit…. or the face is a bit ….. well in the end it’s all about the emotion a picture gives you, I have several images in my portfolio that are far from perfect (the perfect image actually doesn’t exist I think) but just gave me the emotion I wanted. So just take these tips as guidelines, to know the rules is also to know when breaking them (or better accepting a technical “error” for emotional perfection)

As soon as we start adding the second arm it gets a bit better.

Now if we move the elbow just a bit more to the right we actually make the image a bit more “open”.

You also see that Manon is making her hand smaller by using the side, but also places it slightly behind her face, the reason is simple. A camera doesn’t see depth it will only render something bigger that is closer to the camera (longer lenses compress, wider lenses actually make the effect more extreme), by moving the hand away from the front of the face you are actually creating a more natural look, especially if you shoot with a wider lens.