Getting Repeatable Results
“Anything goes.” The Regional Manager said with an expansive wave of his hands. “We are no longer going to force you to blindly follow a set of standard poses.”
Silence fills the room of Assembly Line Portrait Photographers, many of whom have never done any other kind of work, none of whom are excited by the idea of doing any more work than they absolutely have to.
“This mean you can use your creativity.” The Regional Manger says with a forced smile. “You are free to do whatever you want to do.”
“We want to keep doing what we are doing now.” I mumble into the silence and get a few grumbles of agreement. The Regional Manger gives me a stern look.
“Well, that’s not going to happen.”
From time to time the Company decides that we need to do Something Different-and every last one of them forgets a couple basic facts in the process. 1) The Company is mostly made up of Button Pushers and 2) the Equipment we have to use severely limits what those of us with any additional experience can do.
I have worked with Companies that buy props, hand them out, and say Be Creative. This seldom works out very well. The whole point of Assembly Line Portraits is to do pretty much the same thing at each location-letting the Photographer do whatever they want to do can lead to a bit of chaos. You wouldn’t walk into McDonalds and expect to find Sushi on the menu, and if you did, would you really want to eat it?
What the customer doesn’t know, doesn’t hurt them. If a Photographer goes in and shots the bare minimum of four or five shots on every sitting and a different photographer goes back two weeks later and takes thirty shots of everyone-the people at the Shoot might notice this small difference.
The same is true with the Passers, if one Passer tells everyone the smallest package is $90 and the next one sells a sheet of wallets to everyone for $20 then there are going to be complaints. In the best of all Assembly Line Portraits worlds, we have repeatable-and consistent-results all across the board.
What most Companies do to inspire their Photographers is hand out booklets and CDs filled with Portraits that they personally like at The Plant. These are often complicated poses made with willing models who are invariably young and beautiful and happy. These are often shots filled with things like Wing Chairs, silk flowers, Lace Umbrellas, and other specialty props which none of us have. We are encouraged to find props at The Shoot, such as leather chairs and plants and the like. I seldom find wing chairs at my Shoots and I don’t like the extra effort of moving it around all day when I do.
The Regional Manger was kind enough to say that I could use any equipment I wanted to buy-but that the Company would not reimburse me for any such lights, gobos, or props. Thanks, but I think I will mostly stick with what the Company gives me to shoot with. I have seen a few backgrounds that I like and I did buy a black mesh background, though it didn’t look as good as I hoped it would.
I have made my own revise cookie and have tried to make regular foam core cookies with mixed results. I may have to give it another shot one of these days. I can whip up simple light modifiers after a trip to The Dollar Store, they don’t look very professional, but they work. There are a lot of DIY blogs out there with tips on how to make things like Grid Spots and Beauty Dishes.
I tend to go through phases where I want every light modifier ever created-the problem is that I usually have piss poor Studio Lights to start with, and therefor little hope of modifying their light in any meaningful way.
The Company, of course, is like Taco Bell-they don’t really want to add new items to the menu, they just want the old items arranged in a different way. They want us to change the basic product-an Assembly Line Portrait-in ways that don’t cost anything, don’t require new equipment, and results in more sales. This boils down to using different poses.
In the end, a saleable portrait is not one filled with props, elaborate lighting, or new backgrounds-it’s about the person being photographed. If the Subject just sits there like a lump on a log and stares into space, all the lighting, props, and backgrounds in the world will not make it a great portrait. Unless the Subject happens to be Clint Eastwood.
One of the ironic things about using a lot of light modifiers, contemporary posing, and super tight cropping is that often times The Subject will choose the Basic portraits as the ones they buy.
I enjoy using advanced lighting techniques, but I don’t enjoy Subjects who complain that the image is too dark-when it is meant to be Low Key, or too light-when it is meant to be High Key. A surprising number of people want mug shots-evenly lit images of the Subject facing the camera. So much so that I have added a mug shot to the Standard Set.
I’ve been experimenting with light recently, and the images look, for the most part, very promising. What they don’t look like is what everyone else at The Company is doing. Many of my current portraits are not repeatable with the standard issue photo gear-they are better portraits but I’m not sure they are what the Regional Manager wanted me to do.