Portraits-Lots of Them

I shoot quite a few portraits.  Bridals, engagements, corporate sittings, the odd senior, you name it, I have shot it.   Lately I have been doing fewer of the single person shoots and have gravitated to portrait lines.   By this I don’t mean slamming people through as they walk off of a cruise ship, I am talking about quick but proper portrait sessions.  To me, there are several sorts of commercial portraiture that can be arranged into three basic groups:

• Environmental – You shoot your client in a setting where they often find themselves such as a forest, football field, lake, warehouse or the like.  Seniors and Engagement portraits are often done this way.  You meet them at the botanical gardens and wander around finding great spots.
• Studio – Your client comes to you.  There are probably several clothing and background changes.  The lighting can vary, but generally these are straight forward and encompass all that is generally thought of as a traditional portrait.
• Location – Can be similar to environmental, but in my mind this typically refers to a photographer(s) arriving at a school or business and continuously shooting lots of people, one after another.  I call these Portrait Lines.

You probably went through assembly line location photography every year of school.  I didn’t like them much and liked shooting them even less.  I knew there had to be a way of shooting quickly while obtaining quality results for the clients.  Turn to the left, turn to the right just didn’t work in my mind.  I slowed down, talked to the people, found quick and easy ways to direct them while keeping them happy and comfortable.   I can still shoot four keepers in a minute or two so my overall speed isn’t down, yet the client is much happier with the results.

For this type of shooting, you need to be able to reproduce the look.  You might have more than one line running, you might have to shoot on multiple days, portrait #12 needs to look just like #312.  Its not really that hard.  Write it all down, take a tape measure, mark everything and keep track.  Reassess after the end of each job and make adjustments. Also, you have to remember to shoot for cropping.  By this I mean shoot so that the image can be printed in a variety of aspect ratios.  Look at the image of the directory portrait at the top; you can see that there is more empty space on the left and top than is required.  In fact, this makes the proof appear a bit lopsided.  I do this so that my clients can order 5x7s, wallets, 8x10s, whatever they want of the same image and still have the prints look nearly the same.  All too often I have seen people shoot a tight crop which looks great on proof, but can’t be printed as an 8×10 without cropping out some essential detail of the image.

My upper example probably needs to have a bit more light reflecting off of the table I was using as a posing area, but I am overall pleased with the look. My bottom example probably isn’t the best photographically since I was constrained by space during this shoot and had to put the posing stool too close to the background.  This caused the background to be too much in focus.  I could have shot at a shallower depth of field but that has its own drawbacks in this sort of portraiture.  Everything is a compromise, you just have to decide what is most important.