Sometimes the planets align and assignments are fun. These are the best assignments in the world. Ever.
Big thanks to our friends at Outrider for an excellent few days of shooting. These are good people doing good work. And they’re fun too.
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I’ve been noticing more and more of my friends and associates (i.e. Facebookers and LinkedIn-ers) sporting familiar portraits–shots I made of them for various purposes. What usually catches my eye is how the portraits jump off the page (er, screen) compared to the typical blurry snapshot fare.
That got me thinking. With all the devaluation of photography that’s occurred in recent years, thanks in large part to the sheer ubiquity of photography, I wonder if in fact there’s a new market popping up: the need for a social networking portrait.
It seems like a hard sell to convince a business user that he needs a portrait specifically for his social networking accounts, but then again why is that any less valuable an outlet for the professional portrait than the good ol’ PR headshot was?
So in order to try to answer that question, here’s what I propose: call me up and book a “Facebook portrait” session and I’ll do it for half off the typical business portrait session. Seems fair, right?
It’s about time social networking did something good for photographers. Maybe this is it?
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A lot of clients have lately been requesting an increasingly candid, increasingly natural approach to portraiture. I think it’s because in our visually oversaturated society, we’re looking to cling to any bit of authenticity we can find. The divide between posed and candid is ever more pronounced.
To that end I’ve been working, when the opportunity presents itself, in a more candid style, and with more natural available light. This portrait of Dale Furtwengler, for instance, is as natural as it gets in style and technique, although it was definitely made on assignment–a deliberately contrived situation made expressly for the purpose of photographing him.
This jives with something I’ve recently been tweeting about too. I’m fortunate to wear a couple of hats–including one labeled “contributing editor” for a few photography publications. That affords me the unbelievable opportunity to speak with world class photographers on a regular basis–like last week when I had a nice long conversation with National Geographic and Magnum photographer Steve McCurry.
You may know Mr. McCurry because of his iconic image of the Afghan girl on the cover of a 1985 issue of National Geographic. But what you may not know is that Mr. McCurry’s entire body of work is equally powerful, if not equally well known. While I learned a lot from our conversation, perhaps the most powerful thing–in terms of photographic technique and approach to portraiture–was when Mr. McCurry mentioned that he only uses natural light. He said that if it was good enough for masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz, it was good enough for him.
Beyond the simple technical details, there’s a good message there for photographers. If you get too caught up in technique, you can start to forget what’s most important in a portrait–the connection you make with your subject, and your ability to convey the appropriate message in the still image.
I realize this is a fairly “inside baseball” kind of topic geared toward photographers, but trust me when I say that in the end, dear clients, it translates into better pictures for you, and pictures that more precisely meet your needs. I’m a student of the medium, as much as a practitioner, and I like to think that each improves the other.
And if nothing else, you know that a photographer who cares this much about photographs, the how and the why, is bound to care about making them work on every level for his clients.
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