Almost every shoot starts the same way. Someone says, quietly and a little apologetically, that they are not photogenic. What they usually mean is that they have been photographed badly before. Told to stand somewhere, tilt the head, hold it. Nobody looks like themselves while holding a pose.
The first ten minutes decide the rest
I rarely lift the camera straight away. We talk. I ask what they do, how the week went, whether they are nervous. It sounds like small talk and it is, but it does something specific: it gives people a few minutes to stop performing. A camera is far less intimidating once it is not the first thing that happened.
This is not a technique I invented. It is simply the thing that works, and after fifteen years I have stopped pretending anything else does.
Direction is not posing
Posing tells someone what to look like. Direction tells them what to do. Walk towards me and stop when you feel like it produces something entirely different from put your hand on your hip. The first gives you a person moving through a space. The second gives you a person waiting to be released.
Most of what I say on a shoot is a verb. Walk. Turn. Lean. Look away. Laugh at how ridiculous this is. The picture happens in the half second after the instruction, not during it.
Movement beats stillness
Standing still is the hardest thing to do naturally. Give someone something to do with their body and the tension leaves their face on its own. On film this is doubly true, where stillness reads as stiffness within a second or two.
Why any of this matters
You can fix exposure. You can fix colour. You cannot fix a face that does not want to be there. Everything technical is recoverable. The one thing that is not is the reason people book a photographer in the first place.
I wrote something on my old site years ago that I still stand behind: it is more important to click with people than to click the button of the camera.