“Hey guys, I found some great new videos.” The Boss says with his best telemarketer’s smile. “I think everyone here should buy one.”
“If it’s that great.” I say. “Why don’t you buy it for us?”
“These videos are for your benefit.” He says and nods sagely. “Don’t you want to improve as a photographer?”
I’m all for improving my skills and learning how to use the tools that I have at my disposal. The problem with pretty much all Portrait Photography books, DVDs, YouTube videos, e-courses, and workshops is that they are made by and for Studio Photographers, not Assembly Line Portrait Photographers.
There are a few difference between Assembly Line Portrait Studios and Independent Portrait Studios. An Independent Studio will usually have only a handful of photographers, maybe only one. This photographer will have direct control over the equipment he/she uses, the size of their shooting area, and what type of subjects will come into the studio to be photographed. They may be college educated and may supplement that education with workshops or attending the many Professional photography conferences held each year. They may be active in local business and photography organizations. Photography is a passion.
An Assembly Line Portrait photographer is usually one of dozens, if not hundreds, of photographers wandering around the country doing location Shoots where the room is never the same shape, size, or color. The equipment is what is handed to him/her after two to six weeks of on the job training. The subjects are found by The Company and are often not interesting at all in having their portraits taken. Professional Photography organizations can cost hundreds of dollars a year to join-money the Assembly Line Portrait Photographer doesn’t have to spend. For many, being a photographer is just a job.
There are few things more discouraging than having The Company send out newsletters filled with images that they think all of their photographers should be taking. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with these images and they were even taken in one of The Company’s Assembly Line Studios. But more often than not, these are images which can’t be duplicated due to either the subject or the props used in the photos. People wearing Ren Faire clothes or posing with a cello are nice, and they are good signs that the people photographed want to buy portraits. But that is not who we see come through the door. Our average customers walks in wearing a suit jacket and a pair of shorts, since the Book photo is only from the waist up.
From time to time we are told we should buy this book or that DVD and see how real photographers work. The Boss recently suggested we buy a set of DVDs which feature a lot of Wedding Photographers doing outdoor location shoots. All of these photographers have assistants, brand new top of the line digital cameras, and do massive amounts of post processing in Photoshop. These are not all wedding photographers-some are high school senior photographers-but they are all photographers that take a ton of images and spend all day on a shoot. The one image I found on the DVD’s site of a family being photographed was in a studio with half a dozen lights focused on and about a twenty foot wide, full length background.
I have nothing against Wedding Photographers or Independent Portrait Photographers supplementing their income with a bit of How I Do It video. More power to them. I like most of the videos on YouTube. But I only own about five portrait photography books that have information I can use on the job. I have flipped through a few dozen portrait books that have nothing to offer me. I don’t need information on outdoor portraits, weddings, natural light photography, boudoir, or high school seniors.
I see a lot of little old ladies and a lot of older couples. These are the people who do most of the buying-so what does The Company send me sample images of? Pretty young families laying on the floor. The Company wants to be a little more competitive with the Independent Portrait Studios-modern posing, spending a little more time in the Camera Room, offering a few new products. So far as I know we are not moving into Wedding Photography, but hey, anything is possible. Poses, Props, and Sheets was the mantra of one Company, and it is still a pretty good trio.
David LaChapelle is an over the top portrait photographer who really loves naked women and elaborate sets. He had a Workshop in Dublin last year. If The Company really wants us to broaden our photographic vision, I think they should hook us up with a Workshop in some exotic location with David LaChapelle. I could go for that.
“You drove this wreck here from Texas?” The Coordinator says as he looks at my ten year old pickup truck sitting in his California parking lot.
“Yeah.” I say and give the hood a loving pat. “By way of Maine.”
At the moment I am doing Directory Work and spending a lot less time in interesting places and a lot more time in places no one wants to visit. One of the great short sights in all Assembly Line Portrait companies is that they fail spectacularly in utilizing one of the things that make their companies worth working for-travel to interesting places. They bitch and moan that they can’t get people to work for them because of the travel, and yet people like me who want to travel, are not allowed the option of traveling to places we want to go.
I have worked for Companies that sent me around the country, but the hours were long and the drives were often hard. Six days a week with the seventh day set aside for six hours of travel. This was also not a perfect system, you traveled all over the place, but seldom had time to do anything you really wanted to do. The Company, of course, liked to say that they were not paying us to be tourists, they were paying us to take and sell portraits. I miss those days of seeing a new State every week and going to all those wonderful touristy sites that every state has by the hundreds. I don’t miss the dingbats that ran the company.
Putting Road Warrior into Careerbuilder brings up a list of mostly sales and nursing jobs and the occasional odd job like one I found once working with blimps. I seriously thought about that one for a couple of days. Basically George Clooney in Up In The Air had my near dream job-well, minus the suicidal downsized.
People who travel for a living aren’t going to Six Flags and Disneyland, as a general rule, but you can find good places to eat and see a lot of cool things out the window as you drive from one middle of nowhere to the next. There are still a number of states I have not been to, with Colorado being the closest-not that it is all that close.
During the dead days of summer, I often end up doing a bit of traveling. I am never sure if this is just because other Assembly Line Portrait photographers want a few days off, or because I am willing to go to places several hours down the road. I have gone to Florida, Mississippi, and Kansas on short notice in the summer. I prefer the more northern states in the summer, but that just isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
I was in far Eastern Oklahoma not too long ago. Lots of trees and hills and big skies. The way home took me more into the flat lands and miles and miles of corn. It reminded me of being in Pennsylvania just a little, I spent one summer in Pittsburgh and bought some of the sweetest corn I ever tasted from a guy in a pickup truck beside road. I tend to remember most places by the food we ate and the sites we saw. The sad part is that I still tend to do that, even though I know I should be thinking about taking better portraits. Of course, I take pretty good portraits by rote now.
I let my subconscious do most of the driving while I listen to audio books and watch the world roll by. I don’t like this kind of stuff enough to become a bus driver, but I do like driving for a few hours and seeing the changes in the world that come from just a few hundred miles.
I meet a woman the other day who was 82 years old and was so proud that she had spent all but two years of her life in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. I live in a big city and like having any food, store, movie, or amusement that I can think of. The people in the small towns like to remind me that they have no traffic and that they know everyone in town. I don’t have much interest in knowing everyone in town and the reason there is no traffic is there is nowhere to go. I have also always had this idea that I would like a big farm in the middle of nowhere-but then my idea of the middle of nowhere is not that far from where I live now.
I spend a lot of time in motel rooms and I like to catch up on odd little shows like Mythbusters, The Colony, and Pawn Stars. I also tend to watch a lot of No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain. When I travel alone I end up flipping through the channels half the night, only stopping for a minute or two here or there. If I have wifi I might spend a little too much time following news links and catching up on old blog buddies. I almost always end up heading to Wal-Mart to buy some Circus Peanuts and the usual odds and ends that I run out of on the road.
I like motels with Steam Rooms and Whirlpools and hot breakfasts, but I mostly just take whatever can get. The closer to the Shoot the better.
“When you get 60 percent of the people on the list to come in and have their portraits taken-we pay you 10 percent commission. If you can get 90% of the people on the list to come in, we pay you 35% commission.” The Manager smiled his best used car salesman smile and winked. “That’s pretty good money.”
“What percentage do your photographers normally earn?” I say, all too familiar with mythical commission pay.
“Well, I’m sure that you can get at least 60% of the names on the list to come in.” The Manger says, a little less confident than he was a moment ago.
“When was the last someone got 90% of the people to come in?” I say.
“Most of the photographers get about 40% of the people to keep their appointments.” He says reluctantly.
“And what percentage is that in commission?”
“3 percent.”
You won’t find people earning commission in grocery stores, gas stations, tire stores, or restaurants. You don’t pay commission on things people are going to buy anyway. You pay commission on things people need to be talked into buying-things like cars, houses, insurance, and portraits.
I’ve worked for a number of Companies that have commission numbers that sound really good on paper-40%, 50%, or even 60% for hitting certain numbers-numbers that are pretty much impossible to hit. At one company we had to get people to keep their appointments. Sounds easy enough, right?
What I didn’t know was that many of these people made appointments just to get away from the demon spawn PreSeller who latched onto them like a leech and wouldn’t let them go until they forked over six dollars and made an appointment. We had three hundred plus appointments every week-and we only shot for three days a week. Getting 40% of these people thorugh the door was a mircle. 20% was closer to the norm-1 percent commission there.
One Company paid on the sales Average, not the sales Total, again the top numbers were impressive, something like 20% for a hundred dollar sales average-this was back in the day when a 50 dollar average was considered good. Needless to say I never got that 20% comission check and I don’t know of any one else who did either. Paying on the Average was especially infuritating at the end of the day when three Nonbuyers would walk in and tell us that our Office had told them they had to come in-even if they didn’t want to buy any portraits. This is how pipe bombs find their way into Corporate Home Offices.
The Current Company’s Comission tops out at 10% after you sale a few thousands dollars worth of portraits in a day. I have had a few days where I hit the top Comission, but not too many. At least it is possible-if you are at a Good Shoot, have a Full Appointment Sheet, and everyone is in a buying mood. It helps to have a good Passer as well.
One of the big problems with most Company pay scales is that it is different for PreSellers, Photographers, and Passers-the three parts of the Company that actually come into contact with the real world. I have no idea how The Lab, The Managers, and the Grand Poobahs are paid. But I’m pretty sure it is not based on Comission-at least not the kind of comission we get.
One of the Major Assembly Line Portrait companies pays stright comission-I didn’t last too long there. The problem with this kind of pay struture is that it makes The Hard Sell the only logical way to do business-while The Company wants to lie to everyone and tell them we do nothing but Soft Selling-if they dare to mention selling at all. Mostly they chat up the Freebies and how they Don’t Have To Do Anything-which is fine, so long as they tell them at some point that our business is selling portraits.
The problem with commission and portraits is that it isn’t that much of an incentive. Sure it’s fun to make a lot of money at a Good Shoot-but it totally sucks to make nothing but the daily salary at all the Bad Shoots. There is just not that much that a Photographer or Passer can do to force someone to buy portraits-though I have heard a number of complaints over the years from people who say they were forced.
Most people have become real experts at saying NO over the past couple of decades, so it is little wonder that the two or three people a saleperson runs across that can’t say No ends up with a large package. Besides, once you are out of the hypnotic control of the Master Salesperson, you can always call in and cancel the order. Which some people do, but not that many.
The key to success is sincerity-once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. The Subject should feel positive about the Portrait Taking Experience, but most people don’t. We can flatter them, both with poses, lights, and backgrounds and with kind words once they view their portraits.
People are used to getting customized products-whether this is music, videos, images-we live in a world of endless possibilities. But we also live in a world with a limit on our most valuable resource-time. Yes you can use Photoshop to make an image look like it was painted by Van Gogh or Rembrandt or Jackson Pollock-but we don’t have the time to explore these endless possibilities with you.
And because we are paid on Commission, it is hard not to send out that little message-We just want your money. Which is why so many people walk in the door and say-We’re just here for The Freebie. You can guess what kind of customer service they get.
“I hate having my picture taken.” The woman says as she sits down.
“When was the last time you had a portrait taken?” I say as position the camera.
“About five years.” She says. “Whenever the last time we had directory was.”
“Then you should be happy that you only have to suffer every five years or so.”
If you happen to be school age, the odds are good that you have three or four portraits taken a year-more if you are involved in sports or music programs. If you are a school teacher or a daycare worker you will likely have a portrait taken once or twice a year. If you work in a Big Box Store or a Grocery Store the odds are good that you have a portrait taken about once a year, especially if you are a member of management and they want to hang your picture on the wall behind the customer service desk.
But once you are past school age, you can go for a good long while without having a portrait taken. If you go to church on a regular basis you may get a new portrait once every three to five years-if your church doesn’t do pictorial directories, than you may not get a portrait take very often at all.
Special occasions, such as weddings and high school graduations, warrant a portrait-or more likely a couple of hundred portraits. Small children are often photographed to commemorate such hallmarks moments as 1 year old, 2 year old, and so on. Coming of age ceremonies also tend to warrant a few portraits. Large number wedding anniversaries also often inspire the purchase of portraits.
Which leaves a good deal of time when portraits are not taken. Years go by, some times quite a few years, without portraits. Which is one of the reasons that people hate having a portrait taken. While we see ourselves on a daily basis in the bathroom mirror and don’t take much notice of the incremental changes of aging, these changes seem sudden and shocking when frozen by a camera.
Not everyone is bothered this, I am not overly concerned by my thinning hair and the wrinkles around my eyes-but I am both a man and not yet ready for the retirement home. Men are not subjected to the same insane standards that women are. Paul Newman was still considered sexy when he was on a walker and had an oxygen mask strapped to his face, while most women stop getting acting jobs once they past fifty-let alone have anyone talk about how sexy they are. Of course, I was never exactly Paul Newman to start with.
The point is that most people don’t have portraits taken when they are in the prime of their lives-which is a bit of shame if you think about it. Yes you have snapshots which everyone seems happy enough with these days, but having a portrait done on a regular basis is a good idea.
Anytime you make a major change to your appearance-you’ll want to remember those days with the Mohawk or the shaved head, won’t you? Anytime the family changes, new kids, new home, new pets. That latest tattoo crawling up your leg or over your shoulder. Any time you feel especially good about your looks-that Mr Universe body won’t last forever, either.
The point of portraiture is to leave an image for posterity-and there are more and more people who don’t have any personal posterity to worry about. I see a lot of people who have no children and few friends and their Twitter list probably doesn’t want a 16×20 canvas of them. I also have a lot of people say that they need an updated photo for the obit picture-which is as close as many people come to thinking about posterity.
Showtime’s Tudors recently ended and one the closing story lines was about Henry VIII commissioning a portrait of himself. Long gone was the strong and vibrant King of England, merely a fat, ill, and aged man who wore the crown remained. When he saw the finished portrait he was not happy with it, as it was an accurate depiction of the King’s current state of being. So he demanded that it be repainted-and so it was, with a much more flattering image of the King. This made the King much happier-this was the image that he wanted left for prosperity.
I used to give the Obituaries a look once in a while, back when I read newspapers, and I was always annoyed by people who submitted baby pictures for people who died in their 90s. I don’t know who started that fad but they should be tracked down and slapped-several times. My own images have been used for Obits countless times. There have been times when I have taken someones portrait on Monday and they were dead by Friday. My clientele is an often fragile one-but at least they have a good portrait for their obit.
My own parents where not really into portraits. I don’t recall ever seeing a professional portrait of my father, though there is a studio portrait of my grandfather. One studio portrait. My mother had a couple of vending machine portraits taken when she got her LVN certificate in 1960 and think that was the closest she ever came to having a professional portrait taken. She was the standard issue Mom who filled books with photos of her children but seldom made any appearances in photos herself. There are times that I miss her and wish that I had a good portrait.
I have my own portrait done once every couple of years, mainly to do with work. The Wife has not had a portrait taken recently-I think I should setup the Studio one of these days and do a few shots of her. Or maybe the two of us could go to some Assembly Line Portrait place and get a $6.99 Special.
“What do you call a dog with no legs?” I say as I try to get the couple to smile.
“Unlucky.” The man says.
“Doesn’t matter, he won’t come anyway.” I capture an image, but it is not really all that good.
I’m kind of a minimalist portrait photographer-I spent only a few minutes with my Subjects, and I tend to give them simple and easy to follow instructions. I have a handful of jokes that I tell, most of which are not really all that funny and tend to induce a groan rather than a smile. But they do often lighten the mood and people will relax and smile naturally after a minute or two.
Small children do like the whole saying Cheese thing-and I have a personal preferance for cheesy smiles anyway. I learned to juggle during my I’m going to run off and join the circus years and that tends to impress small children and a surprsing number of adults. Very small children like to see things fall off the top of someone’s head.
“Where do you find a dog with no legs?”
“Wherever you left him.”
My Manager is one of those good people just killing time until he can retire and leave this nasty business of telling photographers where to go behind him. He’s not a big fan of being silly or telling jokes-though he does expect us to take portraits that people will like.
Of course, not everyone wants to be smiling in a portrait, most men and a lot of women like to predent that they are posing for the latest version of American Gothic. A lot of teenages have that whole Angst thing going on and don’t want to smile for a picture either. But I can usually get them to smile for one or two shots-Just for Mom.
“Two worms were in a race. They ended up in a Tie.”
I tend to like slightly mean spirited jokes, but they are, you know, jokes. Some people don’t like the idea of a dog with no legs, or tell me about their own dog who only has three legs or two legs or tell me about that dog they saw on YouTube. But I am not really interested in real world dogs-I’m just trying to get them to smile.
“What do you call a cow with no legs?”
“Ground Beef.”
The fact of the matter is that I only have about five or six jokes that I tell on a regular basis and if someone really wants a joke for every shot-well, their out of luck. I have a lot of people tell me how hard it is for them to smile on command-and I can understand that to a certain extent. I smile all the time so I have no problem whipping out my genuine fake smile when the need arises. The worst people are parents, who look at their children and say-oh no, is that how she’s been smiling the whole time?
“What do you call a cow with two legs?”
“Lean Beef.”
From time to time I have someone tell me a joke, some are good, some are really bad, and almost all of them I have heard before. The ones I haven’t heard are still usually pretty bad. Jokes aren’t what they used to be. People like Jerry Stienfeld and Steve Martin have turned comedy into someone standing around making random comments for forty-five minutes and being paid millions of dollars a year to do so.
Prairie Home Compaion has a Joke Show once a year where they do nothing but tell jokes for two hours. There are a lot of great jokes there-and I can never seem to remember any of them. Of course, most jokes are a bit long and most one liners people have heard before. Still, I do love a good joke.
“What do you get when you cross a dyslectic, an agnostic, and an insomniac?”
“Someone who lays awake at night poundering the existence of DOG.”
I used to take Band Pictures and there are a ton of band jokes-muscians being a natural target of ridicule because they have some actual skills that most of can’t be bothered to acquire. Well, not musicans have talent-drummers sping to mind here.
What do you call a drummer with half a brain?
Gifted.
What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A drummer.
How do improve the looks of a drummer’s car?
Take off the Domino’s sign.
I don’t get to use too many of my band jokes anymore, which is very likely a good thing.
“So why don’t you quit this job if you hate it so much?” One of my co-workers says after listening to me bitch and moan about how much it sucks to be an Assembly Line Portrait photographer.
“And do what?” I say with a sigh.
My fall back plan has always been to be a Writer, which is a great plan aside from the fact that I have never had more than a Letter to The Editor published, and they don’t pay you for those, you know.
I used to think about killing myself in those moments of desperation where the darkness outshone the light, but I have always chickened out at the last moment. I have studied the topic a bit. I’ve read Finial Exit and thought, yeah, I could do that.
I once owned a gun and according to studies, that is the manly way to take yourself out. When I was in high school, I was found of the idea of taking rather a lot of pills, or hanging myself, or well, following in the footsteps of Harold from Harold and Maude. But like Harold, I seem to enjoy that whole being depressed thing a little too much to put an end to it.
I’ve not been overly morose for some time now. The occasional bouts of depression still waft by on the evening air, but I no longer stop and take a deep breath.
My other slightly mad, but slightly possible, fallback plan is to become an Actor. I know, this is even more ridiculous than becoming a writer, at least I have some experience banging out rough drafts, even if I can’t seen to work my way up to a submission copy. Acting, well, it’s one of those things that Young People do, and I am fast falling out of anyone’s idea of what young is.
Still, I do a lot of really good dialects and funny voices-though not quite as funny as say, Sponge Bob or Popeye. Still, I did have an offer from a blog buddy to travel to London and do a bit of ADR for a Doctor Who Christmas Episode. No one leaves American to work in the UK-so there was a tiny possibility that I could have turned this little bit of noise making into some kind of a living. But I didn’t go, and that is one more road I chose not to tread upon.
I have always had a slightly artistic bent, and so being a portrait photographer is itself not a bad choice for a way of making a living. Over the years of Assembly Line Portrait work I have learned a thing or two about the craft of lighting and posing and such. I have also learned a bit about the uses of Photoshop, though that is not something I have ever done professionally.
I still like the idea of London and being a Voice Over Artist-maybe they need someone with that boring middle American voice of mine.
In the meantime, and it sometimes seems that my whole life has been one long meantime, I am still taking Assembly Line Portraits. Some good, some bad, all just a vague blur in my memory. You take a few thousand portraits and they all sort of run together.
I can play with the lights, the backgrounds, the poses. I can steal the occasional idea from a book or a video. In the end the skill sets are not as important as the Subjects. The Photogs that have John Lennon, Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe and the like in their portfolio may not be more skilled than I am-but they had the good sense to want to take portraits that would have staying power because of the Subject matter.
That, of course, is just a copout-as they used to say in the good old days. If I had really wanted to, I could have found a way-maybe I still could. Famous people wander through my neck of the woods all the time, the worst that could happen is they would say bugger off.
The great portrait photographers have Studios and the rich and the famous come to them. Oh I have taken a few portraits of the random rich and famous people, but directly work is not really the same, is it? Even if they did put the photo on the cover of a magazine it wouldn’t have my name, it’d be the Assembly Line Portrait company’s name.
It all goes back to that saying by George Bernard Shaw-The lack of money is the root of all evil. Whatever problems I have would vanish if I could just manage to win the Powerball when the numbers are really up there.
Oh, I know that there have been studies and miserable bastards who win the lotto are still miserable bastards after they win the lotto-but at least they are miserable bastards with money. Well, for a short while until they blow it all.
The real trouble is that being an Assembly Line Portrait photographer makes you lazy, makes you want to sit around reading a book all day and still make a couple of hundred dollars while you’re at it. So I wind my way back to blaming the Company for not keeping me in work-while they are running ads for new Photographers at the same time. Maybe it’s time to start working on that Demo.
“This light-head is broken.” My fellow Assembly Line Portrait photographer says as she pulled down a light with a burnt out bulb. “I need to replace this bulb.”
“Ok.” I say as I look around in the small storeroom for a spare bulb. Before I can find one, the other Photographer grabs the burnt out bulb with her bare fingers and gives it a twist to free it from it’s socket. She has not turned off the power to the light-head. There is that all too familiar sizzle and pop and the smell of ozone mixed with loud and pain-filled curses.
“I found the replacement bulb.” I say as she throws the light-head against the nearest wall.
There comes a time in all good bios where the Hero, such as he is, hits faces down his/her demons and dangers. The drunk goes to rehab, the drug addict has a major breakdown, the steroids user blows a gasket. And maybe that’s why my story of the daily grid is not all that dramatic-it lacks that certain life and death element. Assembly Line Portraits is not an overly dangerous job, but it does have a few small risks and dangers.
One my most common dangers is old equipment. There are many fine brands of lights, Novatron, Speedotron, Norman and many others which use Power Packs. A Power Pack is a kind of voltage regulator with a Capacitor inside it that looks all the world like a car battery. Over time, usually a pretty long time, a capacitor will go bad, and when it does, it will explode. Most Power Packs have a safety feature where a fuse is tripped to prevent this from happening. But it is possible to have someone sit next to the Power Pack and press the reset button each time the breaker trips.
Well, at least it is possible until the capacitor blows, as it did with one of my Trainers. This makes a very impressive noise, much like a shotgun going off, and the sound echoes most gratifyingly in the enclosed space of a Big Box Store. This explosion was powerful enough to bulge out the metal sides of the Power Pack. No one was hurt, though there were a lot of ringing ears for a while.
Flashbulbs and Modeling Lights run pretty hot. These bulbs are often Halogen gas bulbs and create a white hot light. I have had these lights explode from normal use and rain a shower of near molten glass around me. These glass fragments are very hot and I have found small holes burned in my clothing from them-I have not been seriously injured from flying glass. Not yet anyway. One time a bulb exploded and the fragments fell onto a carpet, where they quickly melted their way to the cement floor the rug was resting on. The small glass bits became a permanent part of this carpet, fused into a new compound by the heat.
A more common injury comes from Light Stands. Most modern Light Stands have air cushions inside them and you can release a stand segment and it will float, in a bouncing sort of way, down to it’s closed position. Older Light Stands, however, either have lost their air pressure over time or never had any to start with. So it is not all that uncommon to grab a Stand segment with one hand and release that same segment with the other hand-resulting in the stand collapsing instantly and pinching the skin between the thumb and forefinger. I have had this injure many times, as the air pressure can give out without warning. It is almost always the skin between the thumb and forefinger that gets injured-and it is an annoying wound that takes a long time to heal. I have learned to a bit more careful when lowering light stands.
Children are nasty bits of business for all manner of reasons-they carry diseases, are unpredictably violent, and their parents are invariably morons. Children think a wonderful bit of fun is to hit the Photographer with a prop, such as an umbrella or a baseball bat-one more reason that I no longer use props. They will stomp of your foot if given the chance and if your reflexes aren’t as fast as they should be. They will bite, scratch, and otherwise inflect bodily harm. They put forth all manner of nasty bodily fluids. They have also been known to knock over all manner of equipment-from light stands to backgrounds to the Photographer himself when they run around behind you and trip you up. They also have the habit of hurting themselves and making the most appalling noises.
The Assembly Line Portrait Studio is never exactly the same each time it is setup-cords, posing boxes, tables, and more cords are always tripping hazards. I have broken more than one light-head while freeing my feet from tangled cords. The Photographer is in near constant danger of tripping and falling-and there are all manner of unpleasant items to hit on the way to the floor or pull down on top of yourself once safely on the ground. One of the skills I have acquired over the years is a near uncanny ability to right my balance and free myself from stray cords, boxes, children, and unknown odds and ends that somehow find their way under, around, or near my feet. Tripping is never fun. It is embarrassing, may cause injury, and can lead to injury of the Subject who hops up in an effort to help a Photographer who has lost his/her balance.
The Bad Back is a common inujury for the newbie Photographer. Dealing with children, who are getting larger and heavier every year, involves moving those children around. I worked at a number of Assembly Line Portrait companies which used a table to take portraits of smaller children. The way your supposed to do this is by asking Mom or Dad to put the child on the Posing Table. Mom and Dad are more likely to be used to this, the child is more likely to trust Mom and Dad, and The Photographer doesn’t spend the day lifting 80 pounds every ten minutes.
Kids also think it is big fun to pretend they are dead weight when you try to pick them up, thus raising the chance of an injury-to both Photographer and child when said Photographer is pulled over on top of them. There was one Trainee who had to stay home in bed for a week because he was dumb enough to pick up kids up all day and put them on the posing table.
I have nearly come to blows with the occasional Subject who has very particular ideas about how they should be posed or what I should or shouldn’t be saying to them or their children. These are usually persons of the Red Neck persuasion and tend to take offense if you, oh say, look at them.
Many people of all persuasions think posing for a portrait is either gay or unnatural or both. Just do what I tell you and the portrait will look fine-if you happen to look gay or unnatural that can hardly be considered my fault.
“Please stop that.” I say to the teenage girl standing behind me with her cellphone held up to snap a picture.
“Why?” she says, honestly confused that I don’t want her to take photos of her parents after I have posed and positioned them.
“Do you eat candy out of bins before you weight it?” I say to the look of confusion on her face.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That’s stealing.”
“So is taking pictures over my shoulder.”
On the one hand, I am not as worried about people taking photos over my shoulder as some of my fellow Assembly Line Portrait photographers-they tend to yell at people and throw them out of the Camera room. I usually just wave my hands and ask them to stop. After all, a snapshot from a cell phone or a point and shot camera is not going to be much like the image I will create-the lights won’t trip one thing, and making a portrait is all about the light.
On the other hand, posing is the most visible thing that I do while I am creating portraits. Once it is done, it’s easy enough to look at a posed and group and think, well, that was easy. And after a while it is dead easy. I can pose people in my sleep. That doesn’t mean I like someone stealing money from my pocket by taking a picture instead of buying one.
I went to dinner with a new Passer once and we sat near the door and watched the people as they came in. I told her, I don’t see a happy family any more, I see a group of five and I am already thinking how best to arrange them. A year or so later, this same Passer told me that she no longer saw families either, she saw people that needed a 16×20 or a certain package that was selling well at the time. Working the assembly line we stop seeing people and just see a means of making a living.
Even when I have my occasional bouts of creativity and want to change the lighting, the props, the poses-I still want to do so in order to make the portraits more desirable, more salable. And, of course, I have been known to steal the odd pose myself here and there. It’s all been done before.
From time to time I have someone who doesn’t shoot over my shoulder, but asks if they can take a photo with their camera. I just tell them no. Some people actually ask me to take a photo with their camera-and there was a time that I would do so, at Companies that didn’t pay me a commission on sales.
Once in a while someone will just go outside the camera room and recreate the pose against a white wall. It is a bit annoying, but there is nothing to be done about it. It’s kind of like going into a craft mall and saying-Well, I could make that -about everything you see. Yes, you could.
From time to time I go to Arts and Crafts Fairs. I look at the Fine Art Photography and say-Well, I could do that-only I don’t. There was one fellow who travels between Texas and Scotland and sells the pictures from one to those living in the other. Now that’s the kind of idea that I like. But like all ideas, it requires action, which is where I tend fall down on the job.
I did work with one Photographer who yelled at someone for taking photos over his shoulder and he took his wallet out and said-Here, just steal the money right from my wallet. That’s a bit over the top for me. I’m a little more laid back.
I have a lot of people who want me to take a quick photo that they can post of Twitter or Facebook or whatever and as a general rule I don’t mind doing that. I also don’t mind people asking me to snap a photo of them when they see a camera hanging around my neck at a park or a tourist attraction, but if I’m at work and that work involves selling portraits, yeah, I do mind giving away freebies.
The other day I shot a couple that was having their 50th Wedding Anniversary, and they ordered about $500 worth of portraits as a result. All well and good, but then they turn up back at The Shoot a couple of hours later. Seldom a good sign. They go in and they cancel their order-they say a friend of theirs is a Photographer and that he will take their pictures for free. This right bastard should be slapped into next week-but there is nothing to be done. After all, there may not even be another photographer, they have just made him up to cover their buyer’s remorse. But usually, people aren’t shy about saying they changed their minds.
I have also been involved in Shoots where the Manager came in and told the Passers to give the customers all their the pictures we took, not just The Freebie. The Manager thought we ripping off his customers by trying to sell them portraits. I wasn’t there, but I have always wanted to go into the store and fill and cart and leave with it, and then if tried to stop me, I would tell him he was ripping me off by expecting me to pay. We left that Shoot and sold the portraits at a different location.
People are often generous when it is someone else’s money at stake. There have been many times when I showed up at a Shoot and the Coordinator pulls me aside and says don’t pressure our people, they aren’t going to buy anything. I always tell them we won’t pressure anyone, but if they want portraits, we will sell them, and if that is a problem we don’t have to set up. It’s odd that so many people seem to think we are running some kind of charity outfit, or that we make money by handing out The Freebies.
When working at a Church it is common to hear someone say “I’ll just have what The Church bought me.’ Which is funny, since the Church didn’t buy them anything. Of course, The Church doesn’t want to tell them that.
Just remmeber the words of Robert A Heinlein-There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
“Did you need special training to become a photographer?” The Little Girl says as I set up the shot of her family.
“Nah, I just found an ad that said No Experience Necessary and I thought, Hey, I got no experience.” I smile as I give my usual answer.
“I’d like to be a photographer when I grow up.”
“It’s not too late to change your mind.” I say with a smile.
Her father didn’t think this was very funny, maybe he was a photographer and wanted her to follow in his footsteps, maybe he thought I was being mean and crushing the little girls dreams. But honestly, she was young enough that she would very likely change her mind.
I got my first camera as a Christmas present. It was a toy camera for taking silly portraits. The box was filled with things like cut outs of over sized ears, mustaches, and eyebrows. There was also a very large bow tie and it seemed there were a couple of silly backgrounds as well. The pictures it took were a kind of Polaroid and as I recall, there was some little gimmick that made it look like you were using developing trays. I took a self portrait where I had large pointed ears and a bow tie. I have long since lost that image, but it is still clear in my memory.
My first real camera was a 126mm point and shoot with a large on camera flash. I spent a lot of time taking Fine Art images in black & white that were just awful. Over the next few years I would move up to an Olympus OM-1, which was a very nice 35mm camera. This was an SLR and had all kinds of knobs and twist rings and you needed to learn a bit about f-stops and apertures to take good photos. I learned a lot of stuff that is now pretty much obsolete. But that was a great camera and I took it all over the country and it even made a couple of trips to London with me.
I was a Rent-a-Cop for about ten years. You can’t get a more boring, dead end job than being a Rent-a-Cop, but I was dead lazy and I liked the time to read, write, and think about life, the universe, and everything. The money, well, I didn’t like that so much. So I was always reading the Want Ads and I did find one for a Portrait Photographer that said No Experience Necessary. I was interviewed in a McDonalds inside a Big Box Store and I was hired on the spot and told to pick up my Studio the next day. I spent the next two weeks watching two Assembly Line Portrait Photographers take portraits and show me how they did it. I also had to commit to memory a good part of the first of many three inch thick Manuals on Photography.
I almost quit that second week when I was being trained by a slightly neurotic little man who wanted me to know all the minutia in the Photography Manual. In a couple of months I was the number one photographer in my district. A couple of months after that I was made a Trainer. A month or so later I was offered my own District in Tennessee. A couple of months after that, The Company was no longer in business.
A year here, a couple of years there, a few trips around the State and then The Country and I ended up where I am now. I have worked my way through all of the major Assembly Line Portrait Companies in my part of the country and a few from other parts as well. I have yet to land that Assembly Line Portrait job that will send me to Hawaii or Alaska, though I have applied to a coupe of places that sounded promising. I have not found work overseas either, but hope springs eternal.
Over the last fifteen years or so I have gone from using a long roll film camera to using digital cameras. The Assembly Line Portrait business has moved from waiting two or three weeks to see your pictures to viewing the portraits moments after they were taken-thus making retakes easier and more useful. I now see every portrait that I take, where I never saw any images when I first started.
Those first few months were spent taking portraits of babies on the sales floor of a Big Box Store-usually under a lot of time pressure and a line of Moms with crying kids down the aisle for hours. I had to take five shots of each child, they wanted me to take five salable shots, but that was nearly impossible. Often the Mom would want shots of three kids, ages three, two, and six months and it was not uncommon to hear horror stories of babies falling off the posing table and crashing to the cement floor with its one inch foam rubber cushion. I never had a child fall off one of my posing tables and hit the floor, but I did have kids fall off and caught in midair by Mom. I don’t use a posing table any more.
I was a kind of introvert when I became an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer, I had spent a lot of time alone and my usual method of dealing with people was to run them off or call the cops on them. Now I was a front line service person and I discovered that the Managers of Big Box Stores are all assholes who keep alive the spirit of Adolph Hitler. Grocery store managers are also assholes. In fact, even the Department Managers at most stores are assholes. One of the great things about Assembly Line Portraits is that you don’t have any boss to speak of, and hence we all tend to have authority issues.
Working on the floor of a Big Box store in front of a wandering crowd of shoppers made short work of any stage fright issues I had. Working alone meant I had to deal with all those Managers, Coordinators, and Motel Clerks I was always running into. After a pretty short while, I learn to ignore all criticism and objections and just do my job. Some days are better than others, but after a while I leave them all for better money. Only now, I don’t think there are any better places left to go to.
“What kind of a camera is that?” The Man says as he squints to read around the cowling that surrounds my camera.
“An Olympus-something or another.” I say as I adjust the lights. “It’s a five megapixel digital camera.”
“That’s kind of small these days, isn’t it?”
“Well, we’re not using these images to cover the side of a building, so they are plenty big enough for our needs.”
I remember when Phase One Digital Backs first came out. As a subscriber to Rangefinder I got a free disc filled with sample images from the huge beyond reason 20 megapixel digital back designed for Hasselblads and other high end Medium Format cameras. I was blown away by the size and quality of the images. These files were so huge that it was impossible to view the whole image at once-it broke down into a massive crosshatching of artifacts. But viewed at full size you could see the photographer reflected in the pupils of the model’s eyes and see the individual flakes of make up on her face. Cool.
Digital has been the greatest boon ever to people selling Photographic equipment-you may not need to buy new stuff every couple of years the way you need to buy a new computer every couple of years-but damn you sure want to. Or in the case of the Assembly Line Portrait photographer, you sure want The Company to.
I worked at one fly by night Assembly Line Portrait company that had excellent equipment, all kinds of light modifiers, reflectors, soft boxes, umbrellas, snoots, grids, a wide assortment of gels, three or four backgrounds and all kinds of drapes. These people were firm believers in the Throw Money At It school of problem solving and I was very glad to be the benefactor of that policy. But even while there, I would still get the Dennys, B&H, and Calumet catalogs and run to the office and say-Hey, I Want One of Those.
The current Company has an odd spending plan-they will replace the reconditioned thirty year old equipment with more 30 year old reconditioned equipment. We have floppy disks and dot matrix printers. The light heads and power packs are ready for their spot at The Smithsonian. The only new items I get on a regular basis are Posing Stools and Posing Blocks.
I have always been found of fiddling around with background lighting-I like cookies, swags in a muslin that create patterns, and a lot more gels than the Company hands out. I once worked at a High School Seniors studio and instantly fell in love with all the geewhiz lights and props and backdrops and whatnots. I was especially impressed with the Spotlight-which was capable of putting a perfectly round hot spot on the background and was great for making silhouettes. I have lusted after a small spotlight at every Company I have worked at since. If you have one your not using, feel free to contact me.
Once in a while I luck out and end up with something new. The Company has been experimenting with New Lights-alert Ripley’s! But they have not been experimenting in my Area. I did end up with a couple of light heads from working briefly in another division. These are good lights, I have shot with them before. One Master and three Slaves makes a studio. I am still using my old lights, but have added the new light heads as slaves for my background and accent lighting.
Wow. The new lights have about ten times the power of the antiques that I am used to using. This means that I can illuminate the entire background and not just a small spot behind the Subject’s head. It means I can throw light in funky patterns with a reverse cookie. It means I can put a super hot slice of light on the side of someone’s face for that Hollywood effect I love so much.
So, of course, The Company is now telling me I need to return these lights. I have asked one of my Managers to intervene for me, as I am using the lights to improve my images. They want us to do new and creative shots, but they don’t want to give us any new equipment. Your standard issue Catch-22.
I have never been a big fan of props and stage costumes-but I am very fond of lights and light modifiers. I love things like Lensbaby that allow you add a soft focus to an image and move around the clear spot that will remain in focus. All I need to do is talk them into giving me one to write a review on.
Simple tools like light reflectors and cookies and colored gels are mainly what I use now. I am not in a permanent studio, so I don’t need or want large and bulky items that I will have to drag from place to place. Though I am currently working on a home made Beauty Light and I will see how that works out.
I love playing around with light and lighting patterns on people’s faces. The Subject doesn’t always like it, but then, what do they know?
“Hey guys, I found some great new videos.” The Boss says with his best telemarketer’s smile. “I think everyone here should buy one.”