6 Tips to Improve Men’s Posing For Tinder Photos

You’ve probably stood in front of a camera wondering, what the fuck am I supposed to do here?

The end result? You look like a deer in headlights thus you lack photos of you doing cool stuff. So all you end up with is mirror selfies or gym selfies for your Tinder.

Now you’re wondering, maybe you’re just not cut out to looking good. You’ve been photo adverse for your whole life, so how are you going to change that now? Because there might be a 1 in 1000 photos where you look decent, but that just feels like faking it.

If it requires 999 ugly photos of you, isn’t that the more realistic aspect of you?

In reality, you most likely don’t know how to pose which makes most of your photos awkward. Posing for a camera is a learnable skill you can get better at, which means it’s possible for you to look good more often.

Here are 6 fundamentals to get started on how to look good for a camera, comfortably.

1. Give Yourself Permission to Suck and Keep Doing It

It will feel weird at first, I guarantee it. Or at least, I haven’t met a guy that wasn’t awkward at first. Those that aren’t, 100% have more practice (even if alone!) with it than they dare to say.

And that’s OK. There’s no major skill in life that you are proficient immediately, it always takes a bit of time.

So, allow yourself to feel and look stupid in the beginning. Try different poses while taking shit ton of photos, see how they came out, think what you can improve and ask for feedback, and repeat. In other words, keep posing for photos, reflect how to do it better, and I guarantee you, you’ll get better at posing.

2. Create Angles with your Hands and Legs

Most men, especially who are not used to being in front of camera, stand straight with their hands down. Or alternatively, take some exaggerated “fun” poses that screams self-consciousness.

We know it looks mostly awkward and plain just doesn’t look good, but we don’t know of better.

Solution is fairly simple, you want to create angles with your legs and arms. Angles create details into your pose. Easy ways to do this with arms is to cross your arms, or have a hand in your pocket. If your legs are showing, then you can e.g. raise the leg to the wall if next to one, spread your legs when sitting, or be “mid step” with one of your legs in the air while walking.

If you take a look on IG or fashion magazines, their male models rarely have their hands or legs straight but there are almost always angles in their poses.

3. Squinch Your Eyes to Look Confident

Another major aspect what people not used to the camera do is widen their eyes which makes them look like the deer in head lights. This often happens because they aren’t comfortable so it’s their natural reaction to the camera focus.

To combat the reaction, squinch your eyes to look more confident. Squinching means raising your bottom eye lid slightly without moving upper lid much. This is a natural eye movement, but we often aren’t used to doing it consciously.

To practice squinching your eyes, stand in front of a mirror and try to consciously pinch your lower lid. Practice until you get a hang of it and can feel it even when not in front of a mirror. Aim to do it consciously every time when you are taking photos until it becomes an ingrained habit.

There’s a fine line where your eyes will be too shut compared to “just enough”. Not enough and you look frightened. Too much and you look like your eyes are shut. But from personal experience, the more you practice squinching, more often you nail the squinch without needing to consciously think about it.

4. Achieve Leaner Look By Angling Your Head and Body

Men often want to have broader shoulders and thinner waist to have more of a V-shaped body. To achieve this, you can achieve this in two ways.

When angled towards the camera, lean towards the camera so your shoulders are closer and your waist further. This plays on the fact that things further seem smaller in proportion to things closer.

Another way is to have your waist face to the side at an angle of 30 degrees and your shoulders more directly to the camera. This rotates your torso which slims down the stomach area and emphasizes your shoulder area.

These aren’t miracles tricks, but these help emphasize your physique in photos.

5. Exaggerate your movements and push details to the front

More often than not, details you want to show are not receiving the highlight you want for them. They might be too much in the shadow or behind something, they might look smaller in the photo than they feel, or just something doesn’t feel right.

To highlight what you want, you need to exaggerate the movements of those parts and put those details closer to the camera.

6. “I Feel So Stupid While Doing This”

Focusing on these tips like angling hands, exaggerating your physique with pose and emphasizing accessories for the camera can feel extremely stupid. However, it often is necessary to highlight certain details that make you look good. Smaller details are easily lost because photos are two dimensional thus our typical cues of movement and depth are missing. To compensate for these lost cues, we can and should bring focus on our subject and their details so you are portrayed as the hot guy you are.

Another aspect where you often feel stupid is when taking photos in public. The moment you take out your camera and are going to start, it feels like everyone’s attention turns towards you. In reality, it’s all in your head.

For this, there’s no real solution other than push through the fear of doing it in public. It often feels the worst during the first couple times, but even I still have some fear every time I start a photoshoot in a public place. What helped me when I started out was to do it with a friend and aim to have fun. When you are focused on having fun, you’ll quickly notice that the awkward feeling is long gone and you can just focus on getting killer photos.

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Here are the fundamental building blocks for posing more comfortably for the camera. Experiment with these tips, see whether they make your photos better and combine these with taking photos while performing an action and deeper dive into learning posing. You’ll eventually start to build an intuition where you might need to use which tricks and they’ll start coming more naturally without a conscious effort.

However, pose it not all there is to a Tinder photos, so don’t forget to improve on other aspects as well.

If you did a photoshoot and want some feedback on the photos that you took, hit me up and I’ll review and give feedback on it!