Individuality

“This is the same pose we had last time.” The husband complains as I set them up for the Directory Shot.

“Yes it is.” I say with a smile. “And it is likely the same pose you’ll get the next time.”

“Why can’t we do something different?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Your The Photographer.”

The heart and soul of Assembly Line Portraits is taking the same images over and over and over again.  Look at any directory, yearbook, annual, or mugshot and you will find that they all look pretty much the same.  Oh the face changes, but the body angles and positions remain consistent.

This is changing, slowly but surely, and it is possible to get a slightly different pose for The Book.  You can get the woman in front and the man in back, or the man in front and the woman in back, or you can put them side by side.  Everything else is just a variation.  Everything has been done before and will be done again.

Oh we could try for a shot like the cover of Vogue or Esquire, but most people don’t look as good as George Clooney or Scarlett Johansson.  And no one wants to see the file and rank with their shirts tossed over their shoulder.

‘Formal’ poses have been the rule for most Assembly Line Portrait Companies, which means evenly lite, plain blue background, and poses that were invented in The Renaissance.    Photographers in the 1930s and 1940s were doing amazing things with light and shadow, posing, using props, and getting interesting expressions.  So it is kind of interesting that a lot of the Assembly Line Portrait places are now working on more contemporary portraits.

I’ve worked for Directory companies that wanted ever sitting to be identical to the one before and the one after.  The Big Box Studio wanted five poses for everyone that came in and they had a pretty good idea about what they wanted those poses to be and you heard about it if you shot something else.  The Senior Studio I worked at had four photographers who worked their own small Assembly Lines cranking out the exact same images for each and every kid we shot.

There are two good reason for this, 1) if you take the same shot a few thousand times your going to know how to do it very well-and 2) if you start taking whatever you feel like, you going to get lost in the sitting.  A lost photographer is one that takes a lot more time to shoot a sitting and one that ends up getting behind on a busy shoot.

My own solution to this problem is to shoot a set series of poses that I have had luck selling in the past and then asking if they need anything else.  We really do want you to buy portraits, so if you want floor poses with the kids stacked on top of each other we’ll do our best to get the shot.

One my personal problems is that I don’t like a lot of current style portraits.  I don’t like full length shots of overweight people and older people with white hair shot on a white background.  I’ve never been fond of cutting off the top of people’s heads or shooting just half their face.

The Subject is the most important part of a portrait-not the background, the lighting, the posing, or the image cropping.  But Assembly Line Portrait Photographers don’t really have that much control over The Subject-so we have to exercise control over all the other aspects of the Portrait.  If the Subject won’t follow directions, then there is very little a photographer can do to make a good portrait.

A lot of people who come to Assembly Line Portrait Studios don’t want a good portrait.  They just want an excuse not to buy.  Nothing is more annoying than someone saying they really wanted portraits, but none of the images of their unsmiling, unhappy, inappropriately dressed family are any good.

We do the best we what we have to work with-it’s your portrait and if your over three years old, it’s up to you to make it a good one.