Same Old Same Old
“Wow, looks like you’ve done this a few times.” Say Dad as I move smoothly through the Standard Set, giving directions and moving lights.
“Nah,” I say with a smile. “Your my second family.”
I am pretty much at the top of my game as far as Assembly Line Portraits goes. I can shoot a set of professional portraits in a matter of minutes. I can do fifty such sets in a day, though I no longer do that very often. Now that I have reached the top of what I do, The Company wants me to do something else.
The Wow, you’ve done this before comment is not a compliment, it is the Subject noticing that I am going through the motions, that this is a job, that they are screws to be tightened before I send them down The Line. The best of my fellow Assembly Line Portrait Photographers have the knack for making each Subject think they are special, that the standard shots he/she is taking are created on the spot especially for them.
The trick, of course, is not to let them see that you are doing the same thing over and over again. I read the story of someone who went to a rock concert and how impressed they were at the perfect show they put on that night. So he went back the next night-and was surprised to see that the band did exactly the same show as the night before. They had worked out the precise moves and stage placement for the perfect performance. I notice the same kind of thing on Last Comic Standing, where we hear the commdians tweating their routine over the course of the season-and it’s pretty much the same throughout-but it’s always new to the next audience.
On the one hand it seems kind of silly to think that each Assembly Line Portrait is created on the spot just for us, but on the other hand-we tend to think that everything is created on the spot just for us. It’s not at all uncommon for people to bring in a Portrait that has a pose they like-and it’s one of the Basic Shots we all take.
I can fairly quickly shoot just about anything that walks in the door. The largest group I’ve shot on an 8 foot background is 22. That was a tight fit, but I got a clear line of sight on all the faces, even though many of them were nothing but their faces.
I can do a wide variety of poses, lighting, and cropping-but I tend to fall back on the old standbys when I am slammed. The New System calls for all these new poses, creative use of props and lights, and lots of choices. The idea is to give something different to the Subject, the problem is that we are all used to doing our Standard Sets. Change is never easy.
I recently worked a full week with full schedules-something I haven’t done in a while. I was a bit tired at the end, but I actually made some money that week. I was working with two of the Old Timers-just like the good old days. It was a good week and I can’t help but think I could have been having good weeks all year-if only The Manager had put me on some Shoots.
I am trying to do what The Company wants-I am shooting more images and using more exotic lighting and posing. Well, more exotic compared to the fairly dull and boring stuff I have been shooting. Lots of floor poses, more full length shots, more tight shots, more dramatic lighting with strong shadows.
The Passers like the images and are usually just as shocked as I am when The Subject makes the usual objections about how horrible the pictures are. Any picture they are in, is by default, a horrible picture.
But the people who like themselves, also liked their portraits. The interesting bit is that Buyers will buy just about anything-any lighting, any posing, any cropping and Nonbuyers won’t buy anything, no matter the lighting, posing, or cropping. The Company wants us to change Nonbuyers into Buyers-which is a pretty damned hard thing to do.
One of the biggest sales of the week was someone buying from The Standard Set that took five minutes to shoot. One of the many Nonbuyers was a large family where I took all kinds of extra shots, changed the background several times, and posed them in all the geewhiz new styles that took fifteen minutes to shoot.
Would they have bought off the Standard Set alone? No-they were not going to buy no matter what any of us did, but we would have wasted less of our time. This the great truth that The Company refuses to believe. Same as always.