Leading The Class is as Much Fun as Being in The Class

“I want you to give a couple of training classes to the other Photographers.” The Manager/Owner says as he leans back in his chair behind his big desk. “Share some of what you know and how you learned to take such good portraits.”

“Ok.” I say. “What would you like me to tell them?”

“Whatever you want.” He says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You’re the Photographer.”

I had planned four little talks to give on the Art of Portraiture.  The first was on Posing, the second on Lighting, the third was on Giving Direction, and the fourth was on Order. Design. Composition. Tone. Form. Symmetry. Balance. The Manager/Owner liked the first three, but had serious doubts about the last one.  Basically what he wanted was for me to read straight from my Training Manual from the defunct Company where I had learned to take Portraits a couple of years earlier.  I still had the manual and I could have done that, but I didn’t really want to.

For one thing, most of the people working at this Company had been shooting portraits for a couple of years themselves and I wasn’t sure hitting them over the head with Basic Portraits 101 was the way to go.  They were not taking great portraits, but they were taking some portraits that were selling.  They didn’t need training from the ground up, they just needed to be shown some things they might not have tried before.

Well, I was a bit arrogant at this time-I know some of you will find this hard to be believe, but it’s true.  I showed them how to do a pose or a lighting pattern or how I talk to people to get then into the position that I want them to be in.  I had samples from the other photographers and I used them to show how they could tweak their poses and lighting-just a bit-and get dramaticly better results.  Simple old school-Do This, Don’t Do That.

They all hated me.  They thought I was doing a bit of character assassination.  They thought I was overly harsh and critical.  They told me that I just didn’t know what I was talking about anyway.  I gave them all a little notebook of things to do and told them to read it and try a few of the poses on each of their sittings over the next week.  We had weekly meeting at this Company, one of the many great reasons I didn’t last as long as I could have.  So I smiled and told them I would see them next week.

This Company was an old fashioned High Volume Assembly Line Portrait Studio, we did location shoots in the back of Grocery Stores.  The demon spawn PreSeller sold hundreds of Portrait Coupons and the Photographer had to either call them to get them to come in or shoot as fast as possible when ten groups of ten walked in the door at once.  This was not the kind of job where you could set aside a couple of hours to work on new poses or lighting-it was sometimes a real challenge to get a bathroom break.

So there was little time to practice new poses and lighting.  But they did try a few different things, they didn’t get them right, but they were trying.

I tried a different approach the next week, I pulled out a few samples of their portraits that I thought were done well.  I handed out more lists of things to try.  I talked about Centering and Cropping.  They hated these meetings as much as I did.  I answered questions and offered suggestions.  I showed some of my own portraits and explained how I had achieved this look or that look.  I showed some of their portraits and ask how they had achieved their effect. It was not going well, but it went a bit better than the first week.

I never got to the Bottom Line, which was simply that if you Do This, you’ll make more money than if you Do That.  This was during my Artistic Phase when I still thought that what the Portraits look like had something to do with whether or not someone bought them.  It does matter, just not as much as any Photographer would like to think.

Over the years my general feelings about Portraits have changed a good deal and my general advice about how to take Portraits has changed as well.  The most important part of a Portrait is the expression, or the eyes, or the position of the body in the frame, or how the light brings out the shape of the face-or hides the shape of the face.  And so on.

I now to tend think even more fundamentally-the Subject is the most important part of a Portrait.