Over the last decade, most wedding photographers have shot in a photojournalistic style. Brides rejected staid, formal poses. Wanting energy and great dynamics in their wedding pictures, they requested that their weddings be recorded as they naturally evolved. This free-form approach of photography produced candid shots that told the story of the day. The problem was that the brides did not like the way they looked in those shots.  Thus the emergence of the latest trend for wedding photographers: to shoot in a way that fuses both the posed and the photojournalistic style.

That is the reason I spent almost a week in the Washington, DC area in the past month studying under Clay Blackmore,  one of the top national photographers. He is known for his superb ability to pose people in a way that brings out the best features of his subjects. I witnessed how he could shift the subject's body to give the illusion of that subject being twenty pounds lighter.