The squinch, and why your eyes decide everything.

Find the muscle, then find your fraction.

Sit in front of a mirror and hold your mouth completely still, because the mouth will try to help and it must not. Now pull the muscles that sit directly under your lower lashes upward, as though you were about to read something in poor light. Feel the slight tightening across the top of your cheek. That is the whole move.

Two things must not happen. Your brow must not drop, and your upper lids must not come down to meet the lower ones. If they do, you have made a squint, and everyone reading the picture will think you disapprove of them. Put a fingertip lightly on your eyebrow while you practise: if the finger moves, you are recruiting the wrong half of the face.

Then find your amount, because it is smaller than you expect and it is different on every face. Run it from nothing to too much and back a few times, watching where the eye stops looking open and starts looking closed. Somewhere in the first third of that range is your setting. Learn what it feels like rather than what it looks like, because on the day there will be no mirror.

Wide eyes read as alarm, not warmth.

The most common eye problem in a photograph is not too little openness. It is too much. Nerves widen the eyes, so does concentration, and so does the instruction to look at the camera, which most people obey by staring harder. The result is a ring of white visible above and below the iris, and a face that reads as startled no matter how calm the person actually is.

You have seen the effect and never named it. It is the reason a picture can be technically perfect and still make you look like you have been asked a question you were not expecting. It also flattens the face, because a wide eye throws light across the whole eyeball rather than catching it in one place.

The correction is the same small lift. Bringing the lower lids up eats the white below the iris, narrows the aperture a fraction and puts a slight tension into the cheek that reads as engagement. Nothing about your intent has changed. Only the geometry has, which is the same argument the whole of how to pose for photos rests on.

Where the gaze goes, and why it matters.

Eye direction is a separate control from eye shape, and it changes the meaning of the picture more than any other single thing.

• Straight into the lens is direct address. The viewer is being spoken to, which is what a headshot usually wants.
• Just past the lens, at whoever is holding the camera, is a fraction softer and often warmer. It is a good setting for anyone who finds the lens itself confronting.
• Away from the camera entirely is a mood, not a portrait. It reads as considered when the head is turned with it, and evasive when it is not.
• Slightly above the lens lifts the lower lid naturally and opens the eye. Slightly below it does the opposite and adds weight to the lid.
• Eyes cut to the corner while the head faces forward is the one to avoid outright. Whites bunched at one side of the iris will undo an otherwise good frame every time.

The rule underneath all of that: turn the whole head, not just the eyes. If your face is angled away from the camera and your pupils are dragged back toward it, the picture will look furtive. Bring the head with them. Which direction to turn the head in the first place is a question of angles that flatter your particular face, and that has a page of its own.

Catchlights: the reason some eyes look alive.

Look closely at a portrait that feels alive and you will find a bright reflection sitting in the iris, usually up and off to one side. That reflection is a catchlight, and it is the light source itself, printed in miniature in your eye. Without it the eye goes dull and the whole face reads as flat, however good everything else is.

This is why light from below or straight on so rarely works, and why a picture taken with an overhead light produces those small hard dots that make a face look tired. It is also why looking slightly toward the light rather than away from it improves almost any casual photograph you will ever take.

You cannot add a convincing catchlight afterward, or not one that looks like it belongs. It has to be built while the shutter is open, along with the posture and the expression, and it is one of the specific things I am watching for from behind the camera rather than leaving to chance. It matters more, not less, as a face gains character, which is part of why the direction changes when you pose for portraits over forty.

The stare, the blink, and the fix for both.

Told to hold still and look at the lens, most people stop blinking. Within a few seconds the eyes dry, then water, then produce a glassy hardness that photographs exactly as badly as it sounds. The picture ends up with a face that is technically looking at you and not present at all.

The fix is a rhythm rather than an effort. Close your eyes fully, breathe out, then open them and look at the lens on the way up. The frame taken immediately after that opening is nearly always the best one available, because the eye is freshly wet, the lids have reset and nothing has had time to tighten. Repeat it whenever the eyes start to feel like work.

The other half of the problem is blinking at the shutter, which happens because you flinch at the sound. That one solves itself with volume and rhythm rather than willpower, and it is why the camera keeps running while I talk rather than stopping and starting. Doing something rather than holding still helps too, which is the whole case for movement in posing.

How direction fixes an eye you cannot see.

Everything above runs into the same wall. You cannot see your own eyes while a picture is being taken. A mirror lets you practise the move, but the instant a lens is involved the mirror is gone and you are operating a muscle you cannot check, in a face that has other things on its mind.

That is exactly what somebody watching the frame is for. In a sitting I can see the lower lid at the moment it lifts, the white showing under an iris, the eye drying out, the catchlight sliding off centre when your chin moves. I say one small thing, you do it, and it is fixed in the next frame. You never have to know it happened, which is most of what guided posing amounts to.

It is also why the eyes get directed first and the mouth second in every headshots sitting I do. A smile arranged on top of dead eyes fails. Eyes doing their job will carry a mouth that is doing nothing at all, and the way those two are sequenced is the subject of producing a natural smile on cue.