Re-orienting client expectations. Developing methodologies that work for you. And them.

Family, clients, friends, and that beautiful woman you met at the local coffee house; the one who loves your work. All of them probably share one or two traits; they aren't practicing photographers and don't understand what goes into making the difference between a merely functional "headshot" and an intriguing, satisfying portrait. Usually the expectation from any of these groups of people is that you will lean in and snap a few frames of the smiling subject, without any preparation or requirement beyond focusing your "pro" camera, and a few minutes later everyone will be on their merry way. 

The incidences of thoughtful, constructed (well lit?) portraiture are becoming so rare amongst most of the public that many times now, when I set up a few rudimentary lights on light stands, and use an umbrella or two, my portrait subject enters the room, looks at the set up and says something like, "Wow! Look at all the equipment! I didn't know we were making a movie!" Which I interpret to mean that their expectation for the session was quite different than mine. That they considered a portrait to be a quick, simple, and uncomplicated process that could be done with a phone camera but could maybe be done a little better with a fancier camera. 

To be fair, most people don't spend much time as photographic subjects and the little time they do spend generally consists of: smiling at the camera at someone else's wedding, standing on the yellow line and getting a photograph made for a driver's license, snapping a selfie at the beach, at the bar, at the tourist attraction, when confronted with a chance encounter with a celebrity or, in the current milieu, when they are getting their mugshot made after being arrested for lying to Congress. 

Even people who spent a fortune to have their own wedding captured probably didn't encounter much more than a hot shoe flash with some trendy modifier hung on the front, waving around at the top of a stick, while their drunk friends yelled at them to "Do your duck face!!!" Little wonder that they are unfamiliar with what might go into what we might consider a real portrait session. Especially a session done for the joy of the art and not on the tight time constraints demanded by most commercial enterprises. 

The modern history/legends about corporate photography are always replete with the weathered old pro telling a group of newly minted, future competitors: "You have to be incredibly experienced and talented to photograph CEOs because you'll only get five minutes of their time. And that's if you are lucky. Which you will not be. Sometimes we get ten frames before the publicists run us off like beggar children on the streets of Paris." 

The idea being to aggrandize the amazing depth of knowledge and talent that the "old pro" must possess in order to excel at such a precarious game. Which, of course is mostly... bullshit. 

What's really required of us is to understand that we're dealing with people who need to be educated. Not educated about how some famous photographer shoots, or how they did it in the old days, but educated by you about how you and they can collaborate to be as successful as possible. That education should start when you propose a shoot to a friend, or when you first talk with potential clients. 

The "feature" is that you will take your time to do your process the way you think it should work. The "benefit" is that the client will emerge from your session together with a better portrait than they would otherwise get. And so will you.

When I approach a friend with the idea of doing a portrait (mostly because I think they have an interesting face, and they are flattered to be asked, but on some level presume that they'll be getting an industry standard headshot in return....) I go into detail about what I'm trying to do. I show samples of what I want to do. I talk about the time commitment. I talk about my desire that they wear certain styles and colors of wardrobe and shy away from others. I talk about my desire that they either wear no make-up or very, very subtle make-up. But most of all I let them know that we'll spend at least an hour getting a portrait that I like and that I think they might like. 

If they are game then we are on. All we really have to lose is our time. 

When approaching business clients (the ones who seek us out and pay us for our time and the right to use the portrait we'll create for them) I go through a process of qualifying them to better understand both what they think they want and what their expectations are. If they want a quick, cheap headshot I can suck it up and do that. But if we can refer to work I've already done, and they appreciate the look, then I can walk them through a similar process to the one I described for friends, above. 

The important point is to set the expectation that you'll need X amount of time with the subject, and X amount of set up time to design the look you want (and hopefully the client wants as well). I talk details. I want them to know I'll probably shoot upwards of 250 to 300 frames. That we'll spend time talking. That I'll get rid of every frame I don't like before they get to see a gallery of what I've shot. I even explain to them how I retouch and why. By the end of the discussion the client understands the process I want to pursue. They understand what it will cost them in time and money.  They either come along for the ride or we default to a more ordinary headshot. In rare cases we just can't find any common ground and we choose not to work with each other. 

That, in itself, is a management of expectations. 

The image above is of my friend, Renae. I spent the better part of an hour setting up the lighting I wanted to use to create this image. I didn't have a "cookbook" of styles to reference. I knew the "look" I wanted. The chair Renae sat in was one she and I propped for a previous shoot but one which we both agreed worked well. Over the course of an hour we tried many expressions and poses. Most predicated by conversations about life and photographic aesthetics. 

At the end of the session I had at least a dozen rolls of film which I souped by hand and then made contact sheets. We looked at the sheets together and made little boxes around the images we liked on the contact sheets with a China marker (wax pencil; usually red or orange). I went back into the dark room to make work prints on resin coated paper. I hung these on the wall in front of my desk and soaked them in over the course of a few days (maybe a week) and then one day when I had the energy I headed into the darkroom and spent hours and hours printing variations of all my favorite frames on 11x14 inch, double weight, Agfa Portriga paper. Once they were toned and washed we looked at them all over again. 

It was a process and one that I'm not recommending in the age of digital. Not quite. You can remove all the darkroom drudgery and the parsimonious use of film stock. But the things you might consider keeping would be the time spent thinking about lighting and posing, and creating a real collaboration. 

I added the image below to this tattered essay because I wanted to relate the mindset of re-orienting client expectations with a shoot for a paying client. 

It's a location shot of a real radiologist in a real location but none of the staging, lighting, etc. are as we found them when the client's marketing person and I walked into a dim and windowless basement room in a local hospital. This was the last of maybe a dozen shots in a dozen locations we'd done that day. Most of the previous photos were easy and quick to do because the lighting in most of the locations was conducive to either an available light shoot or, at most, the addition of one or two speed lights. I knew that if we were going to make something usable out of this location I'd need to spend time to do so. I also knew that I'd be mixing flashes with the light coming from computers screens and that my subject, the radiologist, would have to hit poses and become still, stationary, to prevent blurring and unsharpness. 

My first task was to explain to the marketing person why this shot was different, why it would require more attention and why it might take half an hour or so to complete. She got it. She explained to the (tightly scheduled) doctor who shifted to another process while we took apart the closet-like reading room and re-imagined it for the photograph. 

My expectation and the client's expectation was that we'd get a shot that was usable for the project at hand. We set up and shot a number of frames and this is the one I liked best. It's a shot that the large medical practice at which the doctor is a partner still uses this image in some of their marketing over ten years later. Had I not changed gears and explained my expectations for this location we might have defaulted to bouncing a speed light off the ceiling, taken refuge in flat non-offensive light, and moved on. 

Once your process gets explained and you have the client (and subject if they are not the same person) on board it makes the rest of the work easier. If we have time I always want to push the envelope a bit further. That works best if everyone is happy to come along for the ride. 

As to the mythology surrounding the photographing of CEOs and other people with expensive schedules.... My experience is that in 2019 most executives in high level positions, within modern companies, understand (mostly through experience) that they need to invest time in making images if they are to leverage the images into positive media placement properly. They will give you time if you let them know what it is that you need to do in advance. It may mean pushing back. It may mean making more time to explain to a team what your process is. But if your work, your style, is what the client wants then my experience is that most times you'll be met with cooperation and a more satisfying acknowledgement of the skills you bring to the relationship. 

My expectation is that I'll be treated like a professional artist. I expect cooperation. I expect to get paid. And I love it when clients have the same expectations. But the responsibility for educating them about your role and how you do it is entirely up to you. No assumptions, just education.