The poodle pose guide

[commander]

Are you reluctant to adopt poodles/poodle personality dogz at least in part because they won’t show pose like other dogz? While this is true, it’s also an unfortunate “stigma” because poodles have their own fabulous pose, and personally I find getting a pic of a poodle in a good poodle pose far easier than getting a pic of any other breed in either a dali or a dane pose!

These are the two versions of the poodle pose. The first version, the side or profile view, is the one that is used more often and the one I’ll be going into more detail about later. The second pic is of the front-facing view. This is a harder one to get, because when a poodle does go into this pose, it’ll only hold the eyes open for about a split second. Slate the poodle’s head is pretty crooked in this pic—I don’t know if it’s possible to get a front-facing pose with a more even head or not. Getting even this one was a bit of a hassle to begin with.

When a poodle lies down in the correct way for a side pose, its eyes will remain wide open (you won’t see any eyelids) and it won’t ever turn its head for a forward-facing pose. If the eyes are completely shut when it does a side pose, as shown here, wait until it turns to look at you with wide open eyes for a split second. That’s when you’ll get the forward-facing pose.

Of course, even though I find the poodle-posing process easier than dali and ESPECIALLY dane posing, they aren’t 100% cooperative either. Sometimes when snapping pics they’ll sit and stick their noses in the air, or strut with their noses similarly held high. The good news about poodles is that they pretty much live to pose for the camera, so even if they do these poses often, it usually doesn’t take too many tries to get them to lie down with their eyes open and get that perfect show-worthy pose from them.

This is Oedipus, my go-to show poodle for those rare occasions that I’ve encountered poodle shows. While his pose isn’t perfect, he’s done pretty well, so he should serve as a good guide for the things to look for in a good poodle pose.

-Alignment. This is harder to tell in poodle poses than in dali and dane poses, obviously since the torso completely blocks the far two legs. The best way to tell good alignment for poodles is by looking at their noses and faces. Their nose should only show one white shine circle. Only one eye should be visible, and it should be wide open, with little to no eyelid visible.
-The nose/snout should be in a perfectly straight line. Sometimes after holding this pose a poodle will point its nose higher in the air while keeping its eyes open—you don’t want that pose. The entire head should be straight and level.
-Ears point straight and down. Poodle ears will not obstruct the eyes as they will in a dane pose.
-The front legs should be held in a way that only one paw is visible sloping down gently from the wrist.

-The tail should also slope gently down from the torso. (This is the area of Oedipus’s pose that could use some work—see how it kind of abruptly juts out like that?)

Here are a few more of my purebred poodles demonstrating poodle poses:

These poses aren’t perfect either, but they do demonstrate a variety that will be seen if you work on show posing multiple poodles as I have.

These same principles are used to pose mixed breeds that poodle pose, even if they don’t have a poodle head. Take Luden for example:

He’s a poodle/sheepdog/dane mix with a sheepdog face, but obviously with a poodle personality, so that’s how he poses. You can see that we can still judge his pose by looking at the straightness of his snout, the slope of his paws and tail, and making sure that only a single eye is visible and that it is wide open.

Feel free to ask me any questions about any of this! Obviously I know a bit about poodle posing, but since poodle shows themselves are pretty rare and always have been, a lot of this info I’ve had to glean myself through a lot of trial and error. Just as in dali and dane poses, I’m sure that different judges will place greater emphasis on different things—this is largely my own observations and opinions, but I hope they prove helpful.

Now get out there and pose them poodles!

[Thor]

There's a poodle show on PUGs at the moment for those of you who are curious where you can join this type of show ^^

Thank you for this great guide! I saw on your website (because of your breeding service) that you have some dogz who have points in the poodle show ring, so I'd love to host a show so that these cuties can keep showing ;) I'll use your guide to judge and we'll see what happens ^^ (I might end up having more questions)

[salki]

Thank you so much for making this guide!! I've now posed two of my Poodle mixes ^^ I hope they become more popular.

[Amanda]

I appreciate this guide so much! Tons of my favorite bred petz have Poodle personality and I had never tried to seriously pose them before this. Thank you :,)

I've just made a graphic which might offer a little more help if it's ok to post this here? This just shows my personal preference and observations though, I don't know anything about how poodle poses may have been historically judged or if it's technically "right"!

[commander]

Amanda, that's very helpful, thank you! I didn't have a lot of patience to try to get a good forward-facing pose, so your graphic is very appreciated.

[themageofmist]

Lapis and Sapphire's snouts appear to slant downwards when in the profile position, only becoming straight as they start to face the camera. It could be possible that I am just missing the particular frame, though I have even slowed the game down and still not got it. Could it be due to her having a German Shepherd-like snout?


Though they seem to have no issues holding their snouts level in other poses like these:

[commander]

themageofmist, the first pic is the better pose because of the alignment. If the snout was up higher that would be better, but other than that it's a good pose.

(and eep, it looks like some of my images here are broken... I'll go in and fix them soon!)

[Thor]

I feel like I've seen commander and zan host a few more shows recently-- and wanted to know some opinions on judging and what you look for and maybe come up with like a tri-judged show where we can comment on how we judge a show-- I'm curious for some sort of consistent standard on this since I've been out of poodle posing for awhile and feel that my judging of this is very rusty. It'd be fun to see how everyone else thinks/judges :)

[Rho]

I’m grateful for this much of a guide! I was wondering about leg alignment before they lie down. Should they be aligned as if I’m going for a dane/dali pose? I was just having a heck of a time getting mine to look straight forward.

[Amanda]

Nope! You want to angle them away from the camera while standing (similar to catz posing, but even farther turned away) to get the pose to be aligned to the camera - they angle towards the camera with the action so you counter it by starting them turned away.

I've found that you want them even more turned-away for a profile pose than a front-facing one.

(I'll try to get some pics to demonstrate!)

I personally don't agree with pose guides which say "this one exact frame is right and everything else is wrong" (a perfect pose of any kind should be up to the judge's preference imo, like it always used to be), but my favorites from these are row 3 for front-facing alignment and row 4 or 5 for profile alignment :)
I hope this helps!

[Thor]

Yeah! I agree with that. I had done my own little study as well 😂



(I agree that I think they need slightly different alignments)


What I'm always at a loss at is "what is the proper breathing point"? Does it matter ? It seems like you can almost use any frame?

[zan]

Thanks for the tag! I'll try to explain my personal judging process for the next few poodle shows I judge. Honestly I'm still fine-tuning it a bit as I get more experience in judging a variety of poodle poses, but I'm so happy to see the shows being filled again and I hope it continues!!

Amanda that's a really helpful guide, thanks so much for taking the time to do that.

In a poodle profile pose, I definitely prefer a straight line to the top of the snout, with only one nose shine visible. So, Amanda's row 5 would be my pick there. For forward-facing, a level (or close to it) nose with a balanced expression looking into the camera - I prefer Amanda's row 4 here, and Thor's grey poodle in this pose is a very nice example, too. There may be some variation for what angle I think works best depending on the dog's combination of parts, though! In general I'm looking for an overall impression of poise, composure, and haughtiness, something that fits the poodle personality.

Has anyone got any ideas about judging dogz that throw poodle poses, but aren't poodle personality? I've got a dali mix who does this, and the expression is slightly different (worried eyes with some eyelid visible rather than wide open). Can they be entered in poodle shows and judged up against poodle poses from dogz with poodle personality? Should they be faulted/is that kind of expression less desirable?

[commander]

Jan 5, 2021 18:23:36 GMT -5 Amanda said:

I personally don't agree with pose guides which say "this one exact frame is right and everything else is wrong" (a perfect pose of any kind should be up to the judge's preference imo, like it always used to be)

YES THIS! I personally would get bored with shows fast if everyone judged the exact same way. Part of the fun for me is seeing the exact same pose get BIS in one show and HM in another.

But more on topic, I agree with Zan that I like 5 for profile and 4 for forward-facing. But I'd just go with whatever one looks the best to you for your individual poodle.

Thor , I haven't really noticed a true "breathing point" for poodles, so I don't think that matters too much, at least not like it does for other dogz. And zan , I didn't know that about dali-faced poodles--I'll have to do some experimenting with a few of my own and see if their eyelids do the same for me, too.

This is basically a learning experience for all of us!

[commander]

I hope a double-post is alright here!

So this weekend I experimented with three different poodly pups--Tiny Cupcake the dalmatian, Lolita the dane, and Glamorize the golden retriever.

Tiny Cupcake posed with eyes wide open, no eyelids visible, but I thought that might just be because she's small... but Lolita, who is also small, did snow a bit of eyelid. It's hard to tell, but when you zoom in you can see a pixel or two of her eyelid. Glamorize's eyelids are visible, too (ignore her poor alignment lol). It occurred to me that maybe the reason we can't see much of the eyelids in purebred poodles is because their head fluff covers it enough. I think I prefer the pose to show as little eyelid as possible, but this is probably one of those areas that can be chalked up to personal preference of the judge, and it may well be impossible for some breeds to pose with completely wide-open eyes. I'll update the main post to reflect this.

One other oddity I came across with a purebred poodle...

The head fluff partially covers one eye, but the other eye pokes out fully! I think this might have been because I had him angled too far away from the camera. But at any rate, I'd say this is probably best avoided lol