Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!)

prMac of the technology newswire MacMegasite says

Vancouver, BC – PhotographyTips has released its first guide for posing female models for iPhone users, entitled “Poses Volume 1: The First Female Collection.”

“This product will be welcomed and embraced by photographers who use iPhones or the iPod touch, and who have a need to attractively pose female subjects,” said Dan McCormick of PhotographyTips.

Poses Volume 1 contains 368 individual color images of attractive, popular poses that any model can quickly and easily adopt. The application has a unique ‘Fit Pose’ feature that assists in getting the subject’s pose to closely match any professionally-posed example from the application. ...

“This practical guide will solve any photographer’s posing problems once and for all,” said McCormick, “whether photographing a girlfriend at the beach who may never have posed before or a professional model in the studio. It’s easy to use, and a superb posing resource that photographers and models will call upon over and over again for years to come.”

Read the quote in context here.

The volumes 2 and 3 are forthcoming. It’s possible the other two volumes will have poses for men and, I dunno, children or something, but I get the strong impression it’ll be another 736 (for a total 1104) ways to pose women.

Actually though this is pretty interesting. One of the nice things about professional, semi-professional, and amateur photography on the internet (erotic and otherwise) is you see enough images that you start to recognize a certain grammar… and organization… to poses that becomes more stylized cliche´ formal based largely on the experience or training of the photographer.

Even more interesting are digest or excerpt sites that pick out “best of set” photos for reuse on their own sites. If you follow their links to the original photo sets you’ll often see the photo in question isn’t necessarily the “best” content-wise (you might see as much of the subjects, you might see as much of the backgrounds, you might see pretty consistent proportions, focus, color, etc.) but instead “best” fits into one of the (evidently 1104 for women) ways to pose.

It’s not just human photography, obviously. You’ll see it in car and airplane photos, sports photography, food, and even LOLCats.

Anyway, it’s kind of good to see that past some level there really are, literally, templates for posing people.

Update: See also Scott Adam’s Rules of Art.