Formal Portriats-That’s Soo 1890
“I don’t want any of unnatural poses.” The Old Man says as he sits own and turned his face directly into the camera. “I hate those sideways shots.”
“You love mug shots then do you?” I say with a smile. “Because that’s the style of portrait you want.”
I take a Mug Shot of the man and then move the camera and lights around to get a better shot. He’s likely a Nonbuyer anyway, but I want him to see that a good portrait is more than just an ID shot taken at the DMV or by the local police.
Wedding photography has gone so far down the path of Photojournalism Style that it’s possible to look at entire Wedding Albums and not find a single portrait in them. It is a wonder con job that you can charge someone thousands of dollars and then produce the same work that Uncle Fred could do with his cell phone. I fully understand the desire to just snap the shutter and collect the money, why bother with all that posing and lighting and tradition? One of the latest trends in this style of Wedding Photography is to have the Bride go swimming while wearing her dress, or otherwise ruin the dress and document the process for the Wedding Album.
Directory Work is mostly formal portraits, formal posing and lighting, even if the customer shows up wearing shorts and a polo shirt. The Photographer in an Assembly Line Portrait Studio makes most of the decisions, we decide who goes where, what kind of background is used, how the lights are arranged. Most people want The Photographer to be in control and at least act like he knows what he is doing.
There are a group of Standard Poses that all Assembly Line Portrait Photographers use-we use these poses because they sell and they are easy to set and build upon. Assembly Line Portrait poses move easily from one pose to the next with a minimum about of movement. One of the things that The Company never understands is that The Easier It Is To Do, The More Likely I Am To Do It. Make a prop harder to use, a pose harder to light, a shot more work to set up, than I will be much less likely to take that shot. Of course, percentagewise this shot sells more than the regular shot because it is done less often. Once it is folded into the regular set of shots, it doesn’t sell anymore than the old regular shots.
Different sells. But not always. It’s like going to a Super Market and finding some weird lunch meat you’ve never seen before. You might buy some to give it a try, but the odds are good that you’ll go back to what you know later. The usual argument from The Company is that they can’t buy what you don’t shoot. This is true-but too much of the time they just don’t buy anything anyway.
One of the standard poses is for the Man to sit and the Woman to stand behind him and rest her hand on one of his shoulders. This is the pose that most people think about when they think of those old portraits where no one smiled. It also gets occasional comments about how it is a female submissive pose, though I have never figured out how this pose is any more or less submissive than any of the other couple shots.
The Attitude Shot is another poplar image-this is usually the kids with their backs toward each other and their arms crossed. This shot sells most of the time, though I have worked with Photographers who flatly refuse to shoot it-they can do better stuff than that. So can I, but if they buy it, I don’t care how great it is.
The trouble with The Casual Portraits is that an Assembly Line Portrait studio is not setup to take casual portraits. They were all started by people who wanted to be Great Photographers but decided they would settle for making Great Amounts of Money instead. Some of them skipped the Great Photographer part and just went for the making a lot of money bit. I’ve worked for people that don’t know what an f-stop is or what low key or high key means. I’ve worked for places that though posing meant everyone was inside frame, well, at least most of them where in picture.
I’ve only had a few people over the years complain that I didn’t pose them enough-I tend to think of the works of David Lachapelle and George Hurrell when it comes to over the top images. I don’t have the props or the movies stars to use in such shots. I like posed shots, but it’s fun to let people pose themselves from time to time as well.
Quick and easy is the law of the Assembly Line Portrait land-we can’t spend hours setting up a single shot. So we do the best we can with what we have to work with. Turn that way, turn a little bit more, keep going, keep going, keep going-STOP! Ok, smile.