“If I’m still doing this in ten years.” I said in a deadpan serious voice. ” Feel free to shot me.”

I felt old ten years ago when I said that, often tired and occasionally exhausted by the work.  Long hours of driving around the country, setting up and tearing down the Studio, eating way too much junk food and drinking way too many sodas.  Over the past few years I’ve lost a few of the pounds I put on, taken to sleeping more and staying up watching soft porn on CineMax less, but time takes it’s toll. 

I always wanted to be a Travel Writer, in the general sense that I like to travel and like to write.  I’ve never seriously done any travel writing as it takes a certain knack to do it right.   You have to gather facts and figures, you have to take photos that make the place look cool and fun, and you have go somewhere really interesting once in a while.  You also have to actually write them.

It’s been ten years since I did any serious traveling.  In those glory days of yesteryear The Wife and I went up and down the East Coast, went to California and Arizona and spend some time in places like Omaha and Milwaukee.  We found that you could hit most of the touristy stuff any place has to offer in a couple of days-if you rode a GrayLine Tour  bus and weren’t too picky about what you wanted to see.

Over the past few years I’ve often thought of going back to that job where I traveled around the country.  There are places I would like to revisit now that I have a better camera and a better understanding of how to use it.  There are still many places I have never spend much time in and a few states that I have never been to. 

All of that is well and good.

But the work.  Sometimes I find the work to be as mind numbingly dull and repetitious as possible.  Now that I’ve surrendered and gone to the dark side of Shoot-N-Show, I find that selling is sucking my soul dry.  People are stupid and I want to slap them.  Now I understand why The Wife was so pissed off all the time when she was a Passer.  It’s work that pisses you off.  I get paid straight commission and the shoot coordinator wants to pack the schedules with people ‘they want in the book.’ 

The problem is not with the Subjects, it’s with how the Company sells the Program.  Get a FREE Directory and FREE 8×10!  Hey, it works for the most part, but the places that really want the free crap, really want nothing but the free crap. This can be pretty depressing stuff.

I’m going to do some serious thinking over the next few weeks.  The thing that I’ve missed has been traveling to new and interesting places.  The Old Company was year after year of the same old same old with only the occasional trip to someplace I wanted to visit.  So I have to see if the long hours on the road are as much fun as I remember.  For the most part, those twelve hour drives were never any fun.

One of the fringe benefits of being an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer has always been the ability to bang out the occasional blog post, short story, or novel.  Or read the occasional blog post, short story, or novel.  This tends to stimulate the mind, keep the creative juices flowing, and make the time go by in a blur of odd ideas and standard portrait poses.  So the major drag of Shoot-N-Show is that I no longer have all that lovely free time on my hands to contemplate reality.  Of course, being busy is better than sitting around and doing nothing after hour after hour.  If I were making a couple of grand a day I wouldn’t mind so much, but so far that hasn’t happened. 

I really love writing, blogging, and general all around bitching and moaning.  Being alone and being busy most of the time means that I have no one to talk to and no time to write or read.  I’ve also found that my recent addiction to Pinterest has left my mind completely occupied with such nonsense as the Trinity Knot, a Grumpy Cat, and a vast world of HDR photos.  Pinterest is a lot of fun, but I am in no way using it to make money or successfully promote my blogs and affiliates.  It would be nice if I could quit my day job and just Pin stuff for a living.  But that ain’t happening either.

For now I will just keep doing what I am doing.  Taking pretty good portraits, selling them to people who don’t need too much arm twisting, and finding the spare moment here and there to do a bit of reading, writing, and contemplation.  I’ll be taking more HDR photos and hitting a few of the sights and hopefully all will be well.

I’ve never wanted to be a long haul trucker or a bus driver and just tick off the states as I roll through them.  Being an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer lets me grab a few mornings and the occasional day off to see some of the sites and eat some of the local food.  Of course, that can lead to long days as well.  I’ll see how it goes.

So, hold off on the shooting for a little while.

“This price is the Stretched Canvas Finish, this is with the Regular Canvas, and this is with the Smooth Matte finish.” I say as I lay out the prices for the portraits the Subject has decided to order. “It just depends on which Finish you like best.”

“Those prices are outrageous!” She says as she looks them over.  I do what all newbie salespeople do and quickly calculate a lower price.  She agrees to buy the portraits on the Basic, cheapest finish.

I’ve been taking portraits a long time and old habits die hard.  I love the work of Sue Bryce and Christopher Grey and George Hurrell, but I tend to fall pretty far from the mark when it comes to copying their style of photography.  I fall back on what I have always done-The Standard Set.  The reason for a Standard Set of portraits in the Assembly Line Portrait business is that few people actually come in planning on buying portraits.  So you give them a breakdown of poses that people have shown a willingness to buy in the past.  These are not necessarily the same shots-though they tend to be in my case.

The breakdown for a group of four would be-two for the book, two horizontal with a different background, two vertical with a different background, two of the parents, and two of the kids.  An expanded breakdown would include individual shots of everyone and a shot of Mom with the Kids and Dad with the Kids.  That’s the Photographer’s job, to get the pictures-and hopefully get good enough pictures that they will encourage the Subject to consider buying them.

The Passer’s job is to get people who don’t want to buy portraits to buy portraits.  This is done in part with a carefully crafted sales script that tells the Subject everything they need to know in order to make an informed decision-everything except the price-because that remains a mystery to everyone, even the Passer.

Wal-Mart has done an amazingly good job of training everyone under a certain income level to compare purchases based solely on price.  There’s a reason CPI, the Assembly Line Portrait Company that had the Sears and many Wal-Mart accounts, went out of business recently.  Too many cheap bastards were walking in, getting the Special, and walking out.  That’s a losing game.  Of course, that’s just my take on it, the odds are good that the Company was also run by idiots.

So any Shoot that is near a Wal-Mart has a much better chance of being a bad shoot.  People who really think the only difference between a Rolex and Timex is how they cost are not going to be impressed by low key lighting and contemporary poses-they have only one concern-that they can get as many sheets as possible for twenty dollars.  Let’s just say that none of these people are happy when they find out one 8×10 on canvas costs over $200.

It’s always completely discouraging to be at Shoot where no one is buying.  I tend to shoot a lot of Nonbuyers, but I also tend to have one or two big sales that make up for two or three of them.  When I don’t get the good sales, than I have really bad days.  The Program is not setup for the Wal-Mart crowd, it’s setup for the Whole Foods crowd.  When someones says they want to spend $50-there’s nothing for them to buy.  Nothing.  If they want to spend a couple of thousand dollars-then I can figure something out.

There are plenty of Assembly Line Portrait Companies that sell by the Sheet-which is to say 1 8×10=2 5x7s=4 3x4s=a set of proofs=8 wallets, etc.  Larger portraits are multiple Sheets-2 sheets=1 16×20, 6 sheets=1 30×40, and so on.  The Mall Studios tend to do this kind of pricing-once you know the price per sheet you can decide how much you want to spend and pick however many pictures fall within your price range.  That’s not how it works here.  We price everything individually-except for wallets. So, for example, if you’re used to paying $220 for 20 Sheets, the CD, and $5 each for additional sheets, it comes as a bit of a shock when I tell you that two 5x7s cost $220.

The people who do baby pictures in Malls and Big Box stores work a lot harder than I care to work for a lot less money than I care to make.  But to be fair, they have done an excellent job of training people to believe that a portrait has next to no value.  If someone can get a snapshot developed at Walgreens for fifty cents, why should they pay more than that for someone else to process it?  Telling Subjects with this mindset that I have taken a Portrait, not a Snapshot does no good-their minds have already been bent into a shape that will not be easily changed.

So I tend not to try too hard to change those minds.  I can’t compete with a cellphone and $1.99 Special.  I no longer have the patience to put up with undisciplined brats and their brain dead parents, either.

All of this is by way of saying that I don’t always have good weeks and it depresses the hell out of me.  So much of success depends on Location that I tend to forget that all the rest depends on me.  If the Subjects don’t see value in what I am selling, then I am not giving them portraits that they love.  I’m not telling them what they need to hear at the Pass Table to convince them that 2 5x7s with retouching and a lifetime guarantee are worth $220.

Sure, there are always going to be people who flatly refuse to even consider buying a portrait-they are there for the Freebies that is all their cheap bastard eyes can see.  But when Nonbuyer after Nonbuyer rolls in, it gets to me, and it’s hard to put on my game face and give it my best effort.

So I take a deep breath, look in the mirror and say-Ok, It’s Showtime!

“Get me a 20×24 sample to point at.” I say with a shrug. “And I’ll sell a lot of 20x24s, too.”

This is a tad facetious on my part, as I don’t really think I have the inside track to selling larger portraits.  But I do have the habit of offering the larger portraits to everyone who walks in.

The key to portrait Passing is to maximize the sales, because you will always have too many Nonbuyers to get by on smaller sales.  You really need a handful of larger orders-which often include larger portraits-to have a good day.

The general attitude in Assembly Line Portraiture is that no one actually wants to buy portraits-they want The Freebie and we have to talk them into buying the same way that a car salesman talks a tire kicker into buying.  The same way a TV Commercial makes you want to buy a Sham Wow.  The same way an Internet Marketer makes you want to buy that Get Rich Blogging Course.  I don’t think I’ll ever really be that guy, but I don’t think I need to be him, either.

The key to success is being at a Good Shoot and having enough names on the Appointment List.  It’s always depressing to be at a Good Shoot where every sale is three hundred dollars-and only three people show up.  Of course, it’s more depressing to be at a Bad Shoot where thirty people show up and none of them buy anything.

Taking good portraits and offering all your products doesn’t hurt either.  The Old Company tried a lot of things before they shuttered their doors forever, many of those ideas didn’t work, but a few did.  One of the things that really surprised me was the success of custom made Composites.  The Company had a collection of about ten different three opening digital ‘mats’ that the Passer could insert portraits into.  The Subject would then have the option to pick the mat, pick the poses that go in it, and decide if they wanted it in color, sepia tone, or black and white.  Like many other ideas The Company had tired, I expected this one to fail as well.  But it didn’t, it was huge success and soon accounted for a good percentage of our sales.

Success in selling Composites is the involvement of the Subject.  They need to feel that their input is important in creating the finished product.  Having the Subject make a few more choices does take a bit more time-and offering too many options would lead to decision paralysis.    In Assembly Line Portraits we also have the issue of time-there’s almost always someone else waiting for their appointment.  Of course, if the person in front of me is spending $500, I can always give them a few more minutes.

Wall Groupings are another portrait option has become popular over the past few years.  When a portrait collection is printed on Gallery Wraps and five or six or more portraits are mounted on a wall in a pleasing pattern.  They are wonderful for showing off-and they can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.  Not everyone is going to want a Wall Grouping, but if they do, it can make for a good sale.

When I first starting taking portraits, I was less than impressed with the images that we were trained to take.  The poses were boring, the lighting was flat, and the backgrounds were just terrible.  I had the idea that if only I could learn a few new poses, use a better background light and some colored gels, and change up the lighting ratios once in a while-then I would be on to something.  So I read books, I made light modifiers, and I practiced my new poses and lighting.  And. . .it made no real difference at all. The people that were going to buy, bought-and the people who were not going to buy, didn’t.

I now find myself in the same position on the Passing side of the table.  I have this idea that if I had this or that item to sell, than I would make more money and the Subjects would get more of what they want.  But I’m not at all sure about it.  When The Old Company introduced the Composites, they sold a lot of them, but it didn’t substantially raise the overall Sales Average.  The Plan was that people would buy a Composite in addition to their normal portrait order, but what happened was they bought Composites instead of their normal portrait orders.

We have a number of options already; different finishes, sizes, and sepia and black and white.  As a fan of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I’m used to the virtually infinite number of choices that modern software allows for tweaking an image.  But I don’t have the time or patience to try and wade through hundreds of tones, digital mats, and cropping options with a regular Subject.  But I’m still thinking about trying a few things.

I may never get far past the thinking stage as the whole Shot-N-Show thing is taking a lot out of me.  There are few breaks on a busy day-which is a shock to my Photographer’s system.  I’m used to working about five minutes with each Subject, now I have to work the whole time they are in the Studio.  But if I can curb my grumpy tendencies and put together a few sales sheets, maybe I can add a few dollars to my paycheck.

“The one for the Book has to have the same background and the same cropping.”  I say and show her a sample Book where all the portraits look much the same as the one she doesn’t like.

“Well.” She says still unhappy. “I still don’t understand why I can’t have this one in the book.”

More annoying that people who don’t like the picture that will go in the Book are people who want to guilt you out about being in a Church at all and having the nerve to sell something.  These are mostly people my dear old Mom used to call Poor White Trash, in our modern, more accepting world of today, I tend to call these people poor white trash.  These are people with serious entitlement issues who honestly believe that they are owed something by everyone they met.  A typical argument from this group is that they can go to Wal-Mart and get a hundred picture for what I am charging for two-Yeah, you can.  Feel free to do that.  If you can find a Wal-Mart that still has a portrait studio.

There are a few rules in place at a Shoot designed to keep people from ripping us off.  These include rules such as The Same Person Can’t Appear in The Book Twice and People with the Same Address can’t have Two Directory Shots.  These are the rules that I run into the most problem with and people bitch and moan about the most.

Why can’t Gandma be in the Book with me?  She was already in The Book by herself.  So?  Why can’t she be in with me, too?

We won’t have the same address for long, can I just use my Mom’s address instead.  No, I already know you live at the same address, you can’t put down another address.  Well, we’ll just come back some other day.

This is supposed to be something for the church! Yeah-your getting a free book and a free 8×10.  I don’t want an 8×10, I want a 5×7.  Or-I want this for free, not that one!

I’m not much into conflict myself, but my paycheck depends on keeping these bastards from ruining my Sales Average, so I have to enforce the rules.  I sometimes bend the rules a bit because I’m at a good shoot and don’t want to piss of a lot of people, but I can’t break them too often.

I had one of those White Trash women the other day who wanted me to give her the proofs, because I was just going to throw it away anyway.  I sold her the proofs-which I’m supposed not to do-and then she wanted me to give her her grandmother’s proofs.  Because her sweet old Gran was 91 years old and didn’t have any money.  Hmm, really?  Go down to that Wal-Mart you love so much and load up a basket-then see how much of it they will give to your Grandmother because she is 91.

It was clear from her reaction to my refusal to give her anything else that she was used to stomping her foot and making demands and then getting what she wanted.   This was a good Shoot and most of the people there bought portraits, and many bought a lot of portraits.  So what would happen if I did reward this rude and nasty woman’s behavior by giving her the proofs?  She would go out and tell everyone there that I was a fucking sap that would believe a sob story and give something away.  Then everyone who actually bought those proofs for $40 would tumble back in and demand that I give them their money back.  Of course, the poor white trash woman only cares about herself and would likely take great satisfaction if people came in to cancel their orders.  The fact that such behavior does not benefit her in anyway would never cross her mind.

One of the Companies I worked would send out the Freebie for free, but if you ordered anything, the shipping and handling would be something like $14.95.  This was only a major problem for cheap bastards, who were quick to point out that we could just put the second 8×10 in the envelope with the free one.

It doesn’t really help that there are plenty of times that I tend to agree that the rules don’t make a lot of sense.  I can’t really tell them that the only reason for most of the Rules is to weed out the Nonbuyers and keep them from ripping off The Company and stealing money from my paycheck.

There are always going to be people who just want the Freebie, I can handle that, it’s the people who want more than the Freebie that I want to slap into next week.  Again, they are not the norm or there would be no Company and no Church Directory Business at all.

Most people buy something, even if it costs more than they were expecting it to cost.  Most Nonbuyer just say they can’t afford anything right now and leave.  It’s just the occasional drama queen that can’t understand why the world doesn’t revolve around them-usually poor people who think they are Neo and that the Rules Don’t Apply To Them. Sorry, Charlie-the rules were written because of YOU.

“Ok.” I say and crunch the numbers, I tell her the total and she gives me a credit card.

By the end of the day I have a little over $2000 in sales and a pretty good average.  I’m dead tired, but it was a pretty good day.

Next Day-

“I’m just here for the Church.” The rude woman says and looks down her nose at me.  “We’re not buying anything.”

The total for that day is-wait for it-$25.

This was at two different Shoots, but I have had good and bad days at the same Shoot as well.  There have been few times when the difference in daily totals has been this different.

It’s all about Location, one Shoot will have people willing to spend money and another will not.  A couple of Companies back I felt that there was a bit more to be done about this problem.  They had a ton of records and they could look back decades and see which Shoots had bought and which had not.  A Good Shoot might go bad, but it’s damned near impossible that a Bad Shoot will turn around and become a good one.  I always thought that maybe, just maybe, we should not shoot the Bad Shoots any more.  Let one of our many competitors have those particular accounts.

One of the Old Timers I used to work with talked about the rules for booking accounts.  He had a list of things like the size of the church, the health of the members, and how old the cars in the parking lot were and if they appeared to have been washed recently.  In the end, there are a few ways to tell if a church will be a waste of time.  Poor churches in bad neighborhoods are usally Bad Shoots, but not always.  Really well to do chruches where The Mayor and the local College President attend are usually Bad Shoots as well-we’re not good enough for them.  Our ideal customer is one that has money to spend and is willing to spend it on portraits.

Shit Shoots like the one where I had one buyer all day are also most likely to be the ones where the people bitch and moan about the quality of the portraits and want retakes on their Freebie.  I worked for one Company that didn’t have a Freebie-this sort of helped to weed out the Nonbuyers, but half the time they still thought they were getting a Freebie-and they bitched and moaned about that.

This Too Shall Pass was the favorite phrase of one of the Old Pro Passers I used to work with.  Whenever we were at a Bad Shoot, we could console ourselves with the idea that Tomorrow Is Another Day.

I’ve worked with a lot of people who get totally pissed off when they have a Bad Shoot.  The look unhappy, they throw things around, and they often end up yelling at the cheap bastards to get out of their room.  It’s easy enough to let the bastards get you down, but I’m not really into that, never have been.  I may bitch and moan here, but I’m still all smiles and have a nice day at work.  It is only a couple of days, and maybe this Church will get a nice big X beside it’s name and we will never darken it’s door again.

These two Shoots are like countless others.  At one place they commented on how high the prices were, but it didn’t stop them from buying portraits.  At the other, the prices stopped them dead in their tracks. It was all about the Benjamins.  My Manager likes to say that if the Prices seem too high, we aren’t offering enough Top Line Products-which make the lower priced Products seem a tad cheaper.  It didn’t work at this Bad Shoot.

The problem is often the Minister or the Shoot Coordinator, they want the Free Book, but they also want all the money anyone attending their church has in their pocket.  So they tell them not to buy anything.  But this time it really did seem that money was the only issue.  Either they didn’t have much, or they just didn’t want to spend it.  In either case, it ends up being nothing but a waste of time for me and The Company.

The Bad Shoots are not as common as they could be, but they do tend to stick out in the memory more.  I tend to think of the great days where I have a few thousand dollars in sales as ‘Normal’ days and everything else as sub-par and somehow off.  Of course, a day with no sales to speak of, is a really Bad Day.  I have other days to look forward to.

I used to be excited about looking at the website where everyone’s sales totals were on display.  I would often be near the top, or if I wasn’t I could at least console myself with the fact that most everyone else was in the same boat I was.  At places where I was the top dog, I liked to revel in my Favored One status and take a bit of pride in doing so well.  Now I tend to see it all as a game of chance.  If I do great at a Shoot, the odds are good that someone else would have done just as well-maybe better.

Assembly Line Portraits have systems in place that allow simple, repeatable results.  We take the same basic poses, offer the same basic products, and yet some of us make a hell of a lot more money.  In the right location, a good photographer/passer can still run a $250 or better sales average.  I’m not there yet, but I am working on it.  Of course, at some places there is nothing you can do-you just have wait it out.

“Ugh!” The white haired, overweight woman says and pushed the proofs away from her.  “I hate all of them.  I don’t even want to be in the book.  I look terrible.”

The woman gets up and walks quickly away, pulling her poor husband in her wake like a sinking ship.  She was not an ugly woman, I know, I have seen ugly women in my day.  She looked a bit like Paula Dean, which is to say she was an older white woman with large diamonds on each finger and perfectly quaffed hair.   But unlike Paula Dean, this woman hated herself.  She really, really didn’t like the way she looked.

I run into women like this from time to time, oh there are a lot of woman who joke about being old and fat and ugly, but these woman take it all to heart.  They have a truly fucked up self image.  Now I’m no Brad Pitt, but I can look in the mirror and nod in approval at what I see.  Then again, I’m a man, and I haven’t spent my life dreaming of being a size zero and gracing the cover of Vogue.  The odds are good that this woman was a good deal closer to her ideal when she was younger-but she may have hated herself then as well.  Nothing is more annoying than some 16 year old twit who weighs 60 pounds moaning about how fat they are.

On the other hand, working a black church, you’ll find very few, if any, self esteem issues.  There the woman ooh and ah over their portraits and say things like-Hmm, don’t I look cute in that picture?  Instead of wanting to burn the pictures, they’ll spend ten minutes deciding which one they like the best-because they look so good in all of them.  The problem there is that they are not always in a position to buy the five hundred dollars worth of portraits they pick out.

And that may be the rich woman’s ploy-she didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks.  But I’ve seen a lot of woman past their prime who seem unable to deal with the idea of growing older.

Men can be a bit vain as well.  I’ve had men in their 70s and 80s come in with portraits taken while they were in their 20s and say they want to look like that.  Uh, sure, I’ll do what I can.  They are seldom happy with the results either.

A common refrain I hear from older folks is:You never know how bad you look, until you have your picture took.  Most of them are not serious, time takes it’s toil on all of us.

One of the standard poses I do is the woman standing behind the man with her hand on his shoulder.  For some reason this pose makes people think of American Gothic, even though that is not the pose used in American Gothic.  They all say things like-This is a pose for old people!  This can be funny when the person talking is pretty damned advanced in years.  Of course, that’s part of the problem, none of us recognize that old person in the mirror-we are forever children in our minds, or at least young adults.

So for some people, having a portrait taken is a tragic event.  It is a brush with reality they can easily enough avoid in the rest of their lives.  I had one old woman who said she hadn’t looked in a mirror in five years.  Needless to say she was a bit shocked at what she saw in the portraits.  There was another older woman who broke down and cried when she saw her portraits.  I’ve had countless people tell me that the pictures are not of them, that they don’t look like THAT.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

It’s not uncommon for someone to say they don’t like the pictures, and then have one of the kids tell them that it looks just like them.  The standard response is-Yeah I know, that why I don’t like them.

There’s an Assembly Line Portrait Studio called Glamor Shots that specializes in old school Hollywood style poses and a more than generous application of Photoshop effects.  Just like my hero George Hurrell, their goal is to turn a human being into an idealized porcelain statue.  I don’t have the luxury of time needed for such work-my Subjects get the images straight out of the camera.  There are times when I wish I had a few minutes to tweak the images.

Another thing that happens is people looking at an image and seeing nothing but some flaw that is virtually invisible to everyone else.  I’ve had people complain about scars, birthmarks, uneven eyes, and all manner of minor imperfections-things I honestly don’t see until they are pointed out.  I always feel like saying, yeah, this is a photograph, the camera can only capture what is in front of it.

Of course, we do offer retouching for an additional charge.

Of course the real problem with these people who hate themselves is that they are a pure waste of time and they are taking money out of my pocket.  They knew what they looked like before they came in and that was a time slot that a Buyer might have used.

But then, that’s my general complaint about all Assembly Line Portrait Companies, they spent a little too much time getting any warm body through the door and not enough time qualifying the  prospects.  The reason for this is that unlike say, McDonalds or IKEA, no one goes into an Assembly Line Portrait Studio intending to buy what we are selling.

But you at least know you are having a photograph taken, and if you would really rather go to the dentist, please, go ahead and go to the dentist instead.

“We’ll get to that in just a couple of minutes.” I say and smile. “First I need to know what you want.”

“I can’t tell you what I want unless I know the price.”

Being a Passer is just as annoying and challenging as I thought it would be.  After years of sitting by and watching others do the selling, and seeing the rage they feel after a Subject has wasted a good half hour picking favorites, deciding on sizes and finishes, and then balking at the price and hopping up and running for the door, I still tend to think that the system might need a little tweaking here and there.

Like all Photographers, I tend to think that my work should sell itself-I take good portraits and you should want one when you see it.  But such is not the case, as I have come to realize over the past few years.  I seldom take portraits that are worthy of being in The National Gallery, but I do take a certain amount of pride in them.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t help any when the Nonbuyer tells me how much they love the pictures, but they don’t have any money.

No One EVER has any money-unless they decide they want something.  And this is where the witchcraft of selling comes into play.  Just as the Mystery Method can talk a cute young thing out of her knickers, a good salesman can get a Prospect to buy just about anything.  I am not yet a good salesman.  The fact of the matter is that I may never be a great at Passing, but sometimes my images are good enough to overcome my piss-poor skills at getting people to create a Wishlist of portraits they would like to own.

I’ve always thought that being totally honest would be the way to go.  The 8x10s are $25, you want ten, and they cost $250.  Nice and simple.  But it never works that way at an Assembly Line Portrait Company.  Maybe the First 8×10 is $25, or $35, or maybe $75-but the other nine, well, that number changes radically depending on the Finish, The Retouch, and where The Company decided to put the Discount Point.  The result is a pricing scheme that is hidden away in the guts of a computer program-where the finial cost has a lotto like quality of randomness, where adding or removing a portrait can have little or no effect-or even raise the price a few dollars.   Most Passers use this to their advantage, it’s another selling tool.  I’m still kind of struggling with the whole thing.

A few years back there was a car company called Saturn-they were a One Price car.  There was no haggling over the cost, though there was some wiggle room on the trade in and the service warranty.  The idea, again, was simple:An Honest Car Dealership where you don’t have to ask for the Best Price, because it’s on the car already.  They went out of business a couple of years ago-and car dealerships have continued to haggled over the down payment, the price for the trade in, and how much the monthly payment will be.  Oddly, everyone seems pretty happy with this arrangement.

And so it goes with Passing Proofs.  There’s a push and pull, an offer and counter offer, and most of the time the Deal goes through and we are both happy.  Other times, well, not so much.  But it’s a situation where we only have to put up with each other for fifteen or twenty minutes-if they really, really don’t want anything-a lot less than fifteen minutes. During this time what determines success or failure is how well the Passer controls the Subject.  The key is to steer them toward the decision we want them to make-buying a bunch of portraits.  We do this by asking questions, making suggestions, and recommending our highest quality-most expensive-products.

Like the Old Pros I have known, I can lose my patience with someone who wants twenty-five 8x10s and then balks at the price.  Really?  What exactly where you expecting the price to be?  The price range on 25 8X10s is about $500 to about $3000-depending on finish, framing, and retouching options.  That’s a pretty wide gap-and it’s a pretty wide gap on ALL the prices for anything from one 5×7 to a wall grouping with a 20×24 and four 11x14s.   So no, I really can’t tell you how much it will cost.

How much? is a question I can relate to.  I’m a cheap bastard myself and trying to get people to fork over a thousand dollars for a portrait collection is a not coming easy to me.  But I have had a couple of good sales and I have sold a few 16x20s.  But again, I tend to feel that it was more of an order taker situation than my great Passer’s skills that got the order.  I’m still struggling with control issues and people who demand to know the price or which one is going in the Book before I reach that point of my presentation.

I’m also not quite as outgoing as most of the successful Passers I have known.  I’m not big on shaking hands and complementing everyone on what great colors they are wearing.  For me, all of that feels fake and comes across fake.  The Portraits I can talk about, I know portraits.  Dale Carnegie I’m not.

My other major problem is dealing with the long ass hours.  I’m driving three hours a day round trip to and from work, because this particular Assembly Line Portrait Company doesn’t pay for a motel until its 75 miles away.  It’s only fifteen miles more than more places, but it makes a big difference to me.  It also makes a big difference to my Subjects, the last two or three or five of which get the zombized me stumbling through the photography and the sales presentation with my eyes drooping and my attention wandering.  It makes doing the nightly paperwork all but impossible-as I can’t think straight at all by the time I get to that point.

But ALL Assembly Line Portrait Companies do that-have you work long hours, do paperwork when you are dead tired, have you driving around looking for a motel in the middle of the night after shooting all day-and so on and so forth.

It’s not that bad, for the most part.  I do this work of my own free will and can always leave if the going gets too tough or the paychecks get too small.  I met one of my fellow Old Timers a couple of weeks ago-he was not a happy camper and he has since quit.  One of the great problems with working for fifteen Companies is that you tend fall into the habit of wishing that This Company had That Companies benefits or That Other Company’s Pay Scale or Yet Another Company’s Per Diem.  This line of thinking, were all the best parts of each failed Company raises it’s glorious head, leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction with the reality of The Current Company you happen to be working for.  That’s not the way we did it at Buy More-Pay Less Portraits!  Uh, yeah, so what?

All of us Old Timers also have a pretty high opinion of ourselves and our portraits.  Those of us with Management experience expect to be put into Management again.  Trainers expect to keep training.  We want regular pay plus Bonuses.  In short, we lean toward the Prima Donna side and can easily talk ourselves into believing we are being ill-used and our true talents are being left to go fallow.  I have few such believes any more myself.  I just want to make a good living and travel the country-and Assembly Line Portraits have been my ticket to that end.

If this means I now have to learn the finer points of customer control, so be it. This will be an ongoing issue.  I’m not as good at bullying people as you might think.

“Hi.” She says with a huge smile.  “What sizes portraits do you normally share?  Is 8×10 big enough or would you give 11x14s or 16x20s?”

I’ve seen this happen a hundred times and I’ve even fallen victim to it myself.  Watching someone flounder as they try to do something they are not comfortable with doing is tough.  A Trainer is usually someone pretty good at doing their job, but this in no ways means that they have a clue how to teach someone else how to do.  It doesn’t help matters when something like 80% of the Trainees wash out.  Assembly Line Portraits is not a job for everyone.

Photographers take portraits and Passers sell them.  It helps to have good people in both positions, but anyone in the business will tell you that the hierarchy goes something like this-Location, Passer, Photographer.  Without a good location, the other two don’t really matter.  You can send the best Photographer and Passer to a Bad Shoot and they will not make a lot of money.  But since the Booking of Shoots is beyond our control, we have to do the best we can by taking good portraits and presenting them for sale in the most favorable and persuasive way.

The Sales Script is usually a well crafted bit of business designed to tell the customer everything they need to know about buying portraits from The Company.  We tell them about the Book, about The Company, and about The Finishes and Sizes, and we ask them who they share portraits with.  Mixed in are the mundane facts of the business. This is Your Free One, but you can Upgrade-for a reasonable price.  We can do this because most people buy portraits.  As with the famous Used Car Salesman, we put off talking about price as long as possible.  Countless books have been written on Closing The Sale and Overcoming Objections and so on and so forth.

Just as there are Photographers and Button Pushers, there are Salespeople and Order Takers.  I’ve always been pretty good at the Order Taking part.  Oh, you want three framed 8×10 Canvases with Retouching?  Sure I can take your money!  Thanks for coming in!  Well, everyone is pretty good at being an Order Taker.

Learning to Pass Proofs is like learning anything, it takes a bit of time and effort to get it right.  This requires a bit of patience from the Trainer and the willingness to let a few sales slip away as the Trainee learns the ropes.  But a real Salesperson HATES letting a Sale get away.   It physically pains them to watch some newbie fumble around and offer a sheet of wallets to a customer that was talking about buying 4 8x10s-before they heard the price for the Canvas.  It’s like watching Bruce Banner change into the Hulk as the old Sales Pro charges the table to Save the Sale.

The problem, of course, is that we know the Old Pro can do the job, we need to see if there’s any chance the Newbie can do it.  This constant disrespect from Trainers is one reason Trainees don’t last.

The way I Train is pretty straight forward.   The first couple of days they watch me do stuff.  I explain this or that as I setup the Studio.  Why I put the background where I put it.  Why I chose this room over that room.  Why owning a good hand truck and an electric fan are investments that will pay for years to come.

Dealing with the mechanics of the job-paper work, camera settings, light positions, etc can wait a couple of days.  Hopefully The Company will have a useful Training Manual that covers all that stuff.

Taking Portraits is the fun part of the job, so I spend some time right off the bat having them look through the view finder and getting used to capturing images with the particular camera that The Company got a deal on and bought a hundred of at one time.  I show them the cropping, over and over and over.  I let them take a few captures of Singles and Couples.  I explain a bit of the reasons behind why I pose groups this way or that.  It all has to do with the size of the people in the portrait.  After a couple of days I let them shoot a sitting-or try to let them shoot a sitting.  The urge to jump in and correct this or that is necessary in the beginning.  If they are still making the same mistakes a week or two later, well, maybe this isn’t for them after all.

Or maybe they just need some time on their own.  My own Training has always improved once my Trainer has gone back to wherever they came from and I can settle into doing the work in my own fashion.  Despite what every Assembly Line Portrait Company wants to think, you can’t turn a Photographer or a Passer into a clean cut kid at McDonalds asking every Subject if they want fries with that.  They can limit where we shoot and what we sell, but we are Creatives and we will end up it doing it our way or not at all.

In the end Training is just a starting point.  A good Student will continue to learn, will read books and watch videos and maybe even attend a couple of workshops now and then.  I still fall back on my initial training from nearly twenty years ago, but I’m not limited by it.  I’m hoping the same will be true with my Studies in the fine art of Passing.  I at least feel like I have made a start, and that’s something.

“Well.” The Passer says in his calm, monotone selling voice. “We are giving the Church a free directory and we also have to pay for our traveling expenses to come out here and take your portraits.”

I’ve been around the Passing Table off and on, but I have never been a big fan of the whole selling part.  But the times they are a changing, so I need to pay a bit more attention to the Pass.  Being the mega-nerd that I am, I’m reading books and watching workshops on how to sell.  Of course, the modern world of selling is a little different from the old hard sell of Assembly Line Portraits.

My favorite war stories about the Pass come from the Golden Age of selling pre-printed packages.  In those halcyon days of yore, you would go in to have a portrait taken and two or three weeks later you would come back to view actually paper portraits.  Since the Photographer never saw these images, there were often one or two that had the eyes closed, or kids moving, or some other problem with the image.  This would leave the Passer with fewer images to sell than they would like.  Some Photographers also liked dropping poses when it got busy.  This could turn a $129 package into a $39 and that wasn’t good for anyone.

Of course, having real photographs for sale meant that the Passer was free to be a little creative in his or her sales techniques.  It was a pretty common practice to tear a photograph in half when a Subject said they didn’t want the picture.  This would encourage them to buy the next picture before it also went into the shredder.  I heard stories about a few Passers who used small clotheslines that they would hang the photos from.  If the Subject said ‘No’ they would dramatically light a match and set the portrait in question on fire.  Ah, those were the good old days.

Also in those glory days it was great to be a Passer.  The Company would send you a couple of hundred portrait packages and you tried to sell them.  The ones that weren’t bought were to be taken out back and tossed in the dumpster.  But there was no one from the Company there to watch you toss them out.  Hmm, maybe if you called all those Nonbuyers and offered the $129 package for, oh say, $20 they might be more willing to buy them.  So after the official sales were over, some Passers found they could make an extra couple of thousand dollars a week during the busy season.  Not too bad when you consider that the big earners in those days were raking in a whooping $30,000 a year.  This was not a practice sanctioned by The Company and they tended to fire anyone they actually caught.

At the Photography Table, I also had a range of junk for sale.  Lockets, Key chains, small frames, and the Company Club Program.  The commission on these sales was pretty small, but I found a way around that.  I just asked for a bag of key chains every time I saw my Manager.  She was happy to get rid of them, as no one else liked selling them and The Company kept sending them to her by the hundreds.  So I sold the key chains and kept the money.  At $5 for three photo key chains I was making an extra $20 dollars or so a day.  Since I was often being paid about $50 a day, this money came in handy and I was a motivated seller.

Over the years I have been a Passer once or twice.  Selling is HARD.  As an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer I was trained to move people through the Photography session quickly and easily.   I learned to bully people into sitting still while I took the required five shots and I still have to stop people from hopping up and running off today.  This drill sergeant mentality doesn’t really translate well to the Pass Table.  Most Assembly Line Portrait Photographers have a very basic sales technique-So, do you want anything?

The best Passers I have worked with are either women or gay men.  They are all extroverts and laugh out loud at just about anything.  They use a lot of hand gestures, they smile a lot, and they look you in the eye when they tell you how good you did in the camera room.  They are often over the top, but can switch gears when they need to-they can be calm and quiet if that is what it takes to get the sale. My general persona is a little more laid back and I have never found it easy to channel Richard Simmons.

Passers are seriously focused people who use everything a Subject says to get them to buy portraits.  What appear to be random questions to me, are questions that will help the Passer pin the Subject into a corner and trap them in a logic loop.  Of course, that’s not how they would put it.  The Passer would say something more along the lines of: I ask questons to better determine the Buyer’s needs and help them get exactly what they want at the best possible price.

Photographers tend to veiw selling in a negative way and this can make the process of selling difficult for us.  We are perfectly happy to reap the benifits of a Passer who can get blood out of a turnip, but we are not so interested in doing the squeezing ourselves.

“Actually, it is.” The Old Timer Assembly Line Portrait Photographer pipes in, always eager to disagree with everyone he meets about virtually anything.  “They joined the European Union back in 1973.”

The Subject looks at him with a fine mixture of pity and disbelief.  I was more than shocked when she actually bought portraits a few minutes later.  Maybe that whole being an asshole thing really works.  As a general rule I try not to tell people how to pronounce their own name or their own city-or bring them up to speed on the political status of the country they live in half the year.

Over the past twenty to thirty years a vast horde of Assembly Line Portrait Companies have come and gone.  Many fine photographers got their start standing behind a ZII and making a child laugh by having a ball roll off their head.  Many other fine photographers have been ruined in the trenches of the Assembly Line Portrait Wars, unable to move beyond the world of straight commission on weekly sales averages and screaming two year-olds.

Then there are those folks who take great pride in having spent the past twenty odd years hopping from one failing company to another and never having to deal with that whole growing up thing.

Part of the problem is the way the business is setup.  The Home Office is in North Carolina or Minnesota or Tennessee and the grunts on the ground only see the Big Boss when we get the Company Newsletter and his smiling face graces the cover.  It’s just as well that we never see them, as they would never be happy with anything we have to say about The Company.

So what happens is that we are all islands unto ourselves-spending just a bit too much time with only ourselves for company. This can lead to a slight decline in social skills and over the course of twenty years or so, a complete absence of social skills.  We are hermits surrounded by people.  We spend so much time listening to only our own opinions that we forgot that there might be one or two people in the world who don’t agree with everything we say and don’t care to hear our life stories.  This is particularly odd since we never have any patience with anyone else who want to tell US their life stories.

It’s a solitary life, and we tend to like it that way.  We are given an address and a schedule of appointments.  It’s up to us to find the location and take portraits, hopefully making enough money for ourselves and the Company to keep things rolling for another week.  On a surprisingly regular basis, one week the Company will stop rolling and you’ll have to find somewhere else to take Assembly Line Portraits.  Until then, there is something totally addictive about being in charge of your own life without having to deal with minor annoyances like getting new clients, dealing with complaints, and meeting your own payrolls.  Yeah, the Company tells us where to go, but the smart learns to say it in the form of a question.

Some of us lean toward the intellectual side, using the endless hours in motels and on the road to read/listen to books.  These self acquired and self anointed Doctorates tend to make us a little more informed than the average person.  Some of us go through phases where we can’t help but show off by reciting whole passages of Shakespeare or pretending all the world is the set of Jeopardy and we’re the one with the answers.

There was a time when I fell in love with big words and read a dictionary for fun.  I still tend to pepper my dialogues with the occasion ‘bifurcated’ or ‘morose.’  But for the most part I have mellowed out a bit.  I no longer feel the need to always be right or to get into heated debates about whether or not Texas has the right to proclaim itself a sovereign country.  I can also allow someone else to speak once in a while-there was a time when I just wanted to run over everyone-MY war stories are SO much better than yours.

So when I met this other Old Timer and he talked about all the places he has worked and all the traveling he has done and how much he made in The Glory Days–I couldn’t help but think, good god, is that what I sound like?  Like two ends of a magnet pushing each other apart, I took a near instant dislike to this guy-after all, how many know-it-alls have I meet over the years?  Too many.  But then, like all Assembly Line Portrait Photographers, the odds are good that I may never see him again.  We tend to remain moving targets.

Like all Assembly Line Portrait Photographers I also tend to think of myself as the best portrait photographer doing this kind of work.  I’m good, but I’m still a high volume discount portrait photographer, so being good doesn’t really matter that much.  I can watch all the CreativeLIVE videos I want and compare my work to their’s, but no one is lining up to pay me $5,000 for a family portrait session.

So I will keep thinking I’m a good portrait photographer-and keep traveling and doing my fine art work on the side-until I run out of Companies to work for that are willing to send to places I want to go.