Keep It Simple, Stupid
“So, are you a Photographer or a Button Pusher?” The Customer said with a smile.
“What’s the difference?” I said as I moved behind the camera and composed the portrait using the grid lines drawn on the focusing screen by The Company.
“Well, I’m a Photographer.” The Customer says and smiles as I take an exposure. “I adjust lights, body angels, and camera position. I control the amount of light hitting the film, hitting the subject, and hitting the background.”
“Than I guess I’m just a Button Pusher.” I say as I finish taking the last of the five poses I am required to make. The Customer nods and looks a bit sad.
“There are a lot of good books out there, we can always get better.”
A common theme among Assembly Line Portrait Companies is that they think the Photographer is the least important part of the business. As one Trainer liked to put it, I can train a monkey to do this job. Which is part of the reason that so many Assembly Line Portrait photographers are nothing but button pushers.
My first Assembly Line Portrait Studio was one fixed focus camera with a square umbrella mounted directly on top of it. There was a snooted light we used to take Low Key Narrow Lighted Shots. There were four six foot wide backgrounds in seasonal themes. Everything had to in exactly the correct position for an image to be in focus and correctly exposed.
The key to any Assembly Line is repeatable results, so most places I have worked have had their own variation of the fixed setup. The Main Light goes here, the Fill Light goes there, the Subject is exactly this far from the background, and Camera goes here. You are to never, ever to change the Camera or Light Settings on punishment of termination.
The worst Assembly Portrait Studio I ever used was a set of tinker toy like metal rails that locked everything in the Studio into a fixed position. These people were really worried about their Photographers being idiots that couldn’t be trusted to use a tape measure and place the lights and background on their own. This Studio also meant that there was zero leeway in room size-you had to have a big enough area or you couldn’t set the Studio up.
At the other end of the spectrum I have had Studios with little or no instructions on how to set them up. Your a Photographer, you figure it out. So that we ended up with all kinds of oddball lighting schemes-everything from flat lighting to Rembrandt lighting was possible. We usually ended up with harsh lighting which did not always flatter our subjects.
Assembly Line Portraits are trying to get away from that total Assembly Line look-but old habits die hard. I still like to shoot Diamonds, Circles, and Ridges in my group portraits and do little more than turn a Single from side to side and change the background. I have become a big fan of Hollywood Lighting, strong shadows and lots of hot spots-but it’s not a lighting pattern that is perfect for everyone.
My current Assembly Line Portrait Studio is about the best I have ever had. Four backgrounds plus about twenty gels give me all kinds of options. I can do anything from Full Length to Super Close Up, though few of my customers really want either extreme. With four Lights I can do a lot of Patterns, though not everyone understands what I am doing. It’s common to get complains about Shadows, even after you tell them that Shadows are supposed to be there.
Assemble Line Portraits can move beyond the bounds of the Assembly Line, but what we are really doing is just rolling a new model off the Line. The Line is still there. And most of the time, the Button Pusher is keeping it simple.
I have tried to move beyond my Assembly Line Training and I have read books, watched videos, and studied great portraits. I do the occasional really good contemporary portrait, but my bread and butter is the Basics-because that’s what people buy.