The two musicians working with her that morning carried equally impressive credentials. Between the three of them there was probably more than a hundred years of professional experience tucked into the corner of this small restaurant, swinging away while people ate and carried on conversations –and enjoyed the tunes no doubt – only a few feet away.

One of the hardest thing to do as an electric musician is play quietly. These three were playing passionate, AMAZING stuff at a volume level somewhere just north of a whisper. They traded solos, they swung the tunes up and down the chart and they never once, no matter intensely they were playing, got their volume above the quiet that the job called for.

Key words here ‘that the job called for’.

Pros understand that being creative is one thing and being professional is sometimes quite another. I am approached on a regular basis by young photographers starting out how want advice on ‘the business’. The truth is, the business of photography, much like the business of music, is a mix of the technical and the creative sides of your brain and true success comes mostly to the people who can balance them both and express them both equally well.

For example…we shoot a great many business head shots in my studio. One of the reasons we’ve been successful in this field is that, early on, I studied the technical aspects that make up a solid, professional head shot and have been using and refining them ever since.

Without, hopefully, boring anyone, a true corporate headshot requires a neutral background – black white or gray usually, and most importantly it requires four lights. Key, fill, background light and a hair light, all applied in correct percentages.

Sure you can take someone out in the sun and take a picture of their face and call it a headshot but when the marketing people in a corporation see the shot, you, the photographer, will go in the ‘doesn’t know what they’re doing’ pile and you will probably never get out of it, at least with that particular marketing pro.

It’s the one thing I run into most often with the new photographers. They are enthralled with the creative aspect of photography and unwilling or unable to put in the time to learn the technical and business side.

You can and should learn both. It is knowing the difference and knowing what a particular job requires, much like my wife and her trio playing wild swinging jazz at a whisper, that will help you pull yourself out of the throngs of amateurs and into the ranks of the pros.

The two pictures below might help. The first is a beauty head shot for a model. It dramatic and beautiful because that’s what she needed.

The second is a business headshot, again, it’s all about knowing and being able to get exactly what the job requires.

My view:

“You’re so pretty! You should be a model!”

I have no statistical data to back this up but, in my experience these last seven years as a professional photographer I think that most if not all of the pretty girls in the world have heard that phrase at some point in their lives.

I knew from our earliest phone conversation that Joelle was one of ‘those’ girls, tall and good looking and I knew that, for whatever reason, she had reached the point in her life where she was going to give pro pictures a try.

From Joelle:

Friends, family and strangers have always asked me why I don’t model, but I just thought they only said that because I have always been tall and thin.  It probably helps that I have blonde hair with green/blue eyes…Makes me fit the typical ‘All American’ look that most people think fit the mold to be a model. I on the other hand was a little reluctant. As a teenager especially I was scared to pursue it because every teenager is a little self conscious, so starting a modeling career, I felt I would be scrutinized even more than I scrutinize myself. Well, now that I am older, I certainly appreciate my body and love all parts of my body. It help that a brutally honest person, my husband, is pushing me and encouraging me, so I thought now was a good time to try it out.

My view:

Being pretty is good. Being drop dead gorgeous is good but, in truth, neither one of those factors by itself is enough to get you any actual modeling work. Modeling, believe it or not, is a skill. There is an art to posing and expression just as there is an art to lighting and capturing them. There is an art to the hard work involved in networking that is so vital within the fashion/glamour/promo modeling industry and the models who really learn that side of the business will usually do better than those who don’t.

But first things first, let’s get to the shoot:

From Joelle:

I thought it would be faster paced. I thought the clothes, well my clothes would be tossed everywhere, and I’d be putting on and off clothes very fast, just go go go, click here and there and on to the next.

Instead… I did have outfit changes but a lot of outfits can be altered just a little bit and make a new outfit all together… add a jacket, change shoes, keep the bottom but just change the top. I learned that in photos they all look like completely different outfits. It’s just efficient the way it was done and I liked it. Also, there weren’t a ton of shots being taken all at once. Shannon waited for the pose and movement of my body and then took the shot at the right moment. There wasn’t a ton of flashes continuously. It was not overwhelming which was nice for a beginner like me.

I thought the staff may be stiff, not open and friendly, and I was concerned I might not be able to get comfortable in front of the photographer and stylist with that kind of energy. Well instead, they were all chatty, very friendly, supportive, there was laughter which helps me loosen up, and encouragement from everyone on the shoot. I was overly helped and it felt great.

And, just thinking of my past teenage insecurities, I thought I’d have just a little criticism on my body, which I was ready to take, but for my first shoot at least, I wasn’t told anything negative. So why did I do an extra AB workout the morning before the shoot? Ha.

My view:

Shooting an amateur model at a professional pace doesn’t work. Experienced models understand the need to change a pose/expression with every flash of the lights but beginner’s don’t and if you try to push them they just lock up. In addition they don’t have a repertoire of poses yet. Experienced models have multiple turns and twists they can throw at you because they’ve done them before and they know what works – most beginners, well, you get the drift.

Remember these people are paying us. The goal is to get real pictures in a model’s chosen genre that he or she can use on an Agency comp card (model’s business card).  My team and I spend a lot of time with a new model telling or showing them how to turn their bodies so that their pictures don’t end up looking like really well lit senior portraits.

Joelle’s physical beauty was obvious. She was, like most first timers, very stiff in her movements. Typically this lessens as the shoot goes on, in her case it did dramatically which was helped, I think, by the slower pace and all the snickering from my styling team as they watched me helping our model by demonstrating the basic model S curve…

From Joelle:

I learned a ton by the minute, I felt it was such an amazing experience and feeling to have instant gratification when I could feel myself loosening up and having a good photo session, which did continue to progress in my eyes. When looking back at the photos there is a huge difference and honestly, a completely different person from beginning to end.

I learned a lot about lighting, posing, moving the body, eye contact, placement of your hands and arms, and certainly placement of the hips. More hips! LOL. Knowing your body and what each part is doing all at once. I learned it isn’t easy. It was an awesome challenge.

I began to understand the order of how Shannon had me shooting, starting from fun and smiles to get me loosened up, and then progress into serious and sexy high fashion shots. He was a great leader through each section of the shoot and outfit changes.

My view:

She did progress very quickly. There is a point that can come in a new model shoot, usually fairly early on, that involves  the sudden, two pronged realization that:

1. ‘This is way harder than it looks on America’s Next Top Model’

2. ‘This is fun, these people are here to help me, and I’m going  to go for it’.

What happens when that point doesn’t arrive in a model’s psyche?

He or she goes home with a bunch of really well lit senior portraits, that’s what.

In Joelle’s case the moment did arrive and  she really went for it. In fact we sent some of her pictures to one of the top tier local modeling agencies and they asked her to come in for an interview – always a good thing.  What happens from here in is between a model, her agency or agencies, and Lady Luck. Joelle is a very bright young woman, something tells me that if she applies herself to the business she will have a lot of fun, make some money, and get the chance to make her mama really, really proud.

I asked Joelle what she would have liked to have done differently…

From Joelle:

The only extra perk of a shoot that could be beneficial for the model and even the photographer and staff is being able to instantly see the photo taken on a large screen. I know I could benefit seeing myself right then and there because I could learn what was hot and what was not instantly. Instead of me saying when I leave and later see my photos, “well next time I will do”… this and that. Instead, to benefit the entire shoot and the model to continue to learn even more all at once, it would be such a great idea to have the latest photo taken wirelessly projected on a screen or wall for everyone to see and learn from. As a beginner I am not sure this has ever been done or not the’ norm’, but I think it would be a great invention and/or addition to a photo shoot set.
My view:

Once a shoot goes live the only and I mean the ONLY place a model needs to be looking is into the lens of the camera. A screen or a mirror would be a giant distraction in much the same way that an overbearing mother or grumpy boyfriend giving posing ‘tips’ from the side can. A model’s attention is split, that never works.

Let me repeat: that never works.

Once the lights go on it’s you and the camera, everything you have goes into that lens.

That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed this dual view of a first time shoot and, oh by the way, here are some of her pictures, thank you Joelle, for your hard work in the studio and for taking the time to write down your thoughts.

Second on the list, and I get this one a lot, would be some version of a recent conversation with a young mom who had stopped by the studio to look over some of our kid pics and schedule a shoot for her two boys.

There was a print on the coffee table, a very gorgeous print of a fitness model posing in a very small bikini near a pool.

Nothing trashy, mind you, but a lot of skin, after all the girl is a fitness model (That isn’t the exact shot below but it will give you a good idea of where we’re going with all this.)

“So,” our young mother began, eyes on the print, “where’s your wife when you shoot things like that?”

I pointed at a spot a foot or so to the left of the edge of the print.

“She was standing right about there,” I said. “She styled the clothes and jewelry for the whole shoot, does that a lot actually. That gold necklace kept shifting off center when the girl moved and Teri was adjusting it back every two or three shots”

I pointed to a spot about a foot to the right of the print. “Our lighting assistant Anne was standing right about there,” I said. “She was holding a gold reflector I think, might’ve been white or silver but I’m pretty sure we were using a gold bounce that day.”

I smiled at the young mom. “Makeup artist was standing right behind me,” I said. “I told her if she pushed me into the pool standing so close there was gonna be a scrap.”

“That many people?” the young mom said.

“Pretty much every time we shoot,” I said. ‘It’s a lot harder than it looks, everything has to be perfect, you need a lot of eyes.”

And it’s true. Over the years I have come to rely heavily on several key hair and makeup people, on Anne or sometimes Jason for help with all the gear that goes out, and also on the styling services of my wife, Teri.

People will occasionally look at us oddly when we say we work together on shoots of a…what’s the word…oh, yeah, sexier nature but we work together on Corporate Headshots & Family Portraits, why wouldn’t we work together on everything else?

We’re professionals. We (okay I) bring a lot of gear out on a shoot, or use that same lot of gear in the studio. We (okay I) constantly move and adjust lights and scrims and grids and I meter then test fire then power up and down…add to that wardrobe that is often pinned or taped on the side the camera can’t see so it fits ‘perfectly’ and the constant need for attention to makeup and hair and you have what the young mom couldn’t see in the beautiful print…a room full of people, all working on the same page at the same time toward the same goal:

Getting the shot.

A bottle in a ditch isn’t trash it’s an opportunity to create art…why just look at the way the afternoon sun is glinting off the glass…

A sunset is no longer just the end to a long day it is a festival of gleaming, streaming light to be captured, to be treasured, to be photographed.

Of course ninety nine percent of what you consider art your friends and family consider little more than pretty pictures but you persist, sure that the world is only moments away from discovering your artistry and your new found skills.

You wander the world at every chance, photographing barns and mules and ponds and little kids and old men at gas stations.

Perhaps you take a chance and put together a ‘photoshoot’ (quotes very much needed here) with a pretty girl or a handsome guy of your acquaintance, you know, the receptionist who always wanted to model or the waiter with the George Clooney jaw.

At some point, if you’re lucky, someone might ask you how much you charge for some photographic service or another. The dream of going pro will beckon and, I say this from my own personal experience these last eight years of being a working pro photographer, if you work hard enough and smart enough and if you truly do put in the time you can perhaps turn your artistic eye into a career and that, my dreamy eyed friend, is when you will undoubtedly come face to face with the dilemma that has plagued artists of every stripe since the first cavemen took charcoal to the first cave wall:

Art is fabulous and sorely needed in this world and nine times out of ten as a business endeavor it is hugely and amazingly unprofitable.

Photography, my friends, is a business, and if you don’t treat it like one your chances of actually turning photography into more than just a low paying part time job are slim to none.

Successful full time photographers are few and far between.

Successful full time art photographers are an even rarer breed and so, to make a living with a camera in your hand, you will learn the art of the business headshot and the model comp card. You will learn to make babies laugh and you will learn to sell their doting moms and dads print packages that can keep your business running and growing.

You will learn how to keep your books and how to hire an accountant and a tax preparer. You will learn a thousand things that have nothing at all to do with art because the simple truth is, businesses run by artists usually fail.

How then, you may ask, do I keep the art alive?

Simple, you carve out time in your commercial schedule and you use that time to shoot your art your way and you don’t really give a damn if anybody likes it or buys it.

A while back my daughter and I came up with a concept – a woman dressed in her bridal gown who is haunting an old, falling down farmhouse. The idea was art for art’s sake but truth told I would never have had the technical expertise to pull the shoot off if I wasn’t a pro photographer. I won’t bore you with the exact technical specs but we used long exposures and a gridded light source and something called rear curtain sync when firing the lights to create the effect of see-through ghostliness you will see below.

We practiced. Allyson came in to the studio one afternoon and we timed various exposures with her moving at different speeds to get the effect we needed.

We borrowed a vintage bridal gown from a friend (thank you Peggy Randolph), we traded time with a makeup artist to make my fair skinned fourteen year old child look pale and vaguely threatening (thank you Heather Day). We went to a friend’s farm, to an abandoned tenant farmhouse that that was literally within months of actually falling down and we shot, for neither gold nor silver nor cash, The Ghost Bride series, some of which you see below.

Why? Because we thought it was a cool idea and we wanted to see if we could make something magic out it, no more or less than that.

It was a great day with my child. It was fun, and, as far as we’re concerned, it was art.

Photoshop, the great gold standard of picture editing programs has become, in this modern digital age, more than just a computer program it has become an all encompassing verb, as in: “I didn’t want to come in today, I have a giant zit on the tip of my nose but you can Photoshop that right?”

Well yes, Virginia, yes I can.

Those of us who make a living in the trenches of the professional photography world are asked on a daily basis to make colors brighter, or change them entirely, to put green grass on barren fields and blue skies where thunder clouds roam. We are asked to remove cords from pictures of rooms and to clean smudges from windows, among many other things.

But most of all we are asked to make people look, what’s the right word here…different from the way they look in real life.

And now that you have followed the steps outlined in the first three segments of this series and have acquired your own new Perfect Business Headshot, you are going to want to make sure that the retouch (Photoshopping) of your particular, precious picture, is done correctly.

(Quick technical aside: for the purposes of our Business Headshot, the type of retouching we are talking about here does not include what we in the industry call ‘high end’ retouching – this is a massively intensive, pixel by pixel retouch of a picture to get the sort of look you see in those Vogue Magazine Beauty ads – it is both far too costly and usually stylistically inappropriate for the average Business look so we’re not going to get into it here.)

Back to business…

The first thing you need to know about the person who is retouching your brand new Business Headshot…are they actually qualified to do so?

By qualified I don’t mean do they have a spiffy certificate on their wall, I mean have they put in the time, literally years in most cases to have really begun to understand the process?

When you look at the work on their website or in their Portfolio do the people you see there look fabulous but still, and this is key, real?

If you were to start your own photography business tomorrow one of the first things you would do besides buying a camera and taking out an ad on Craig’s List offering to ‘build model portfolio’s’ would be to Google ‘skin softening’ or some such term and you would almost immediately find one of several tutorials that would teach you how to use a Photoshop filter called Gaussian Blur to make skin look better.

I won’t bore you here with the technical why’s and wherefore’s but this is wrong on every level. Trust me.

Real skin retouching is a process that is done by hand with a special stylus on a tablet. It can be done with a mouse but not for long since all the tiny movements involved would eventually break your hand off right at the wrist.

Real skin retouching involves zooming in to someone’s face so closely that you can literally see skin permutations of tiny lighter colored patches and dark that the human eye cannot make out in real life.

Real skin retouching involves gently brushing at those permutations to make the light spots a little darker and the dark spots a little lighter, in other words evening out the microscopic skin tones that all humans possess.

Notice I didn’t say ‘eliminating’ those different tones, you just even them out.

The problem with using one of those one size fits all blur techniques is that they change everything and by doing so they remove the details that make a well done retouch look real.

Hmmm, maybe real isn’t the right word. Maybe we should use ‘not fake’, after all we can all tell that someone’s been Photoshopped, at least to some degree, can’t we? At least we can assume that their skin is probably not that perfect in real life?

Either way I’ve included some samples of what I’m talking about and let’s get to them.

First off I have to extend  my thanks to Anne Young. Anne is a model and an actress and, oh by the way, a mother of four who works part time in our studio.

She is also the only woman I know who is brave enough to let me post a completely un-retouched photograph of her in this blog and for that I owe you one A.Y.

Here is a headshot of Anne just as it came out of the camera:

Yes she is that sweet in real life. She is also quite capable of climbing out onto a catwalk twenty feet in the air with a 600 watt second light in one hand and a powerpack in the other to get the perfect backlight for a shot, but that’s another story.

So now we know what she looks like in real life.

The first Photoshop example I’m going to show is the result of me going overboard with blur and diffuse glow which are two of the hallmarks of a one size fits all (read: amateur) retouch.

Purty, huh?

You might notice that in addition to removing all trace of human detail from her skin I’ve also hyper whitened her teeth and the whites of her eyes. This is a look you see quite a bit on MySpace and in those ads on Craig’s List. I like to call it the Chernobyl look because the only way a human being’s eyes would ever get that white is if they lived next to a leaking nuclear reactor.

(Professional aside: for the sad few of you out there who looked at this shot and said ‘man, that looks pretty good’, do not delay for an instant – get to the nearest emergency room, STAT, ask the doctors there to remove the ‘Glamour Shots Cortex Filter’ from the front of your brain and while you’re there have them remove the ‘Soft Focus Filter Ligaments’ from the muscles at the sides of your eyelids and you should be fine.)

Now to a gently retouched version of Anne’s headshot:

How does she look to you? Like, oh I don’t know…a person?

Photoshop in  the right hands is a wonderful tool and good retouching is as much a part of the getting the Perfect Business headshot as everything we covered in the first three installments of this series.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them. Here’s to better business for all of us in 2010.

Apologies to those who have emailed, I was a bit overwhelmed with work during the holidays (always a good thing) and to be honest thought most of us are overwhelmed in some fashion or another at that time of the year and took a tiny blog hiatus.

Hiatus no more…I’m back.

In the first two parts of our series on getting the Perfect Business Headshot we learned about acceptance (you are as old as you are, not as old as your last headshot says you are) and we learned about dressing for success in this somewhat stressful and very important process.

Today we are facing the demon…the actual day of your shoot. You avoided alcohol the night before, right? You got a good night’s sleep and arrived at the photo studio if not completely rested then at least as well rested as you could reasonably manage, right? You brought clean, well fitting business clothes in an array of earth tones, right?

You’re ready.

No, seriously, you’re ready to stroll in to my studio or any other professional’s studio, take a moment to relax, maybe get a coffee or a bottled water, check your look one last time in the mirror and then go shoot.

A couple of things to remember…contrary to popular wisdom it is not a legal requirement to tell me you don’t like having your picture taken, I already know that.

Let’s face it, you’re not in the studio because you booked a portrait session and you wanted to be there. You’re not in the studio to fulfill that lifelong ambition of trying out for America’s Next Top Model.

You’re in the studio because someone in your company told you that you had to be there to update your fifteen year old headshot (see Part One of this series for details on the angst involved in realizing that the headshot you’re using now looks more like your kid than you).

So you’re here and so far you’ve done everything right…now what?

The first rule of getting the Perfect Business Headshot – all joking aside- is NOT to smile.

Say what?

Let me rephrase…the first rule is NOT  to smile non-stop. That is, don’t paste on that phony ‘Uncle Joe got his camera out at the family reunion’ smile and then hold it in hopes of some actual humor or life actually sneaking inside it.

You smile when the photographer asks you to. You smile and the instant the shutter clicks you let it go.

That’s right, STOP smiling.

A good photographer will establish a rhythm with you. Smile, let it go, smile, let it go. You want your smile to be natural, happy, and unforced.

So don’t smile. Then do smile. Then don’t.

(Handy photographer tip – if you’re not a toothy smiler don’t try and force that. A certain percentage of people in this world, myself and my fifteen year old daughter among them, just don’t smile with their teeth, a good shooter will sense that about you and let you smile your smile.

If he/she doesn’t sense that tell them you’re not comfortable smiling with your mouth open and then tell them that Shannon Fontaine said it was okay, that really should take care of it)

The second rule…don’t be afraid to ask the photographer to stop for a little bit. Don’t be afraid to sip some water or what have you and breathe quietly for a moment or three and then start back. A good photo shoot is often as rhythmic as a musical jam session.

The third rule, and this is a big one, can summed up as accepting the inevitable.

You’re here. You followed the advice from the first two parts of this series, you brought the right clothes, you’ve started smiling and not smiling just like a pro model (maybe America’s next Top Model isn’t such a great stretch, huh?) so accept the inevitable and GO FOR IT.

That’s right. Give it everything you have, laugh like there is no tomorrow! Dance! Sing! Okay, maybe not all that but do give yourself permission to have your picture taken and to give everything you can in terms of energy to the photographer, if for no other reason than a good shot means you won’t have to do this again for the foreseeable future.

If ever…hey, you got fifteen years of use out of the last headshot, right?

Coming soon – Part Four, The Wonders of the Digital Age or ‘You can Photoshop that, right?’

“Dress for Success”

In the first installment of this (ground breaking? earth shattering?) series we learned that a bit of age in one’s appearance is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to getting the perfect business headshot.

In this second installment I will share with you, as best  I can, my experience these last seven years as a professional photographer and what I’ve learned in regards to the Zen of the Perfect Business Headshot and what I like to call, ‘looking the part’ .

To put it simply, if you’re going to get your headshot done you should prepare for it the same you would a job interview – after all isn’t a headshot in many ways the single most important part of your online business identity?

“Oh no!” says you. “The most important part is my bio.”

Really?

I mean it’s great that you graduated Magna cum laude and you spent those eight years fresh out of college single handedly bringing water to the nomads of sub-Saharan Africa, and yes, it’s fabulous that you saved those kittens from that burning car when you were nine but…be honest, when the causal consumer hits your website these days do you honestly think they read that bio of yours?

And by causal I mean that they haven’t necessarily put you on the short list to sell their home or represent them in court or bring water to sub-Saharan nomads, they’re just collecting information on the web about potential business ventures and who or whom they plan on venturing with.

What’s the first thing they think about you? The VERY first thing they see or notice that gives them an impression of what sort of person you are?

Your headshot, knucklehead – and here are a few tips on looking the part of someone who our casual consumer would actually want to do business with.

1. Get a good night’s sleep the night before. No, seriously, go to bed and sleep and tell yourself that you want to look your best and rest will help.

Why? Because it’s true.

2. Don’t drink any alcohol the night before your photo shoot, or the day of for that matter. Alcohol will make you puffy, no two ways about it, leave the Jack in the bottle till we’re done and you’ll be the happier for it.

3. DRESS FOR SUCCESS – Don’t wear your every day office clothes. For goodness’ sake don’t wear your casual Friday clothes. Wear the clothes that you do business in when the meeting is THAT meeting and it’s THAT important – you want to be taken seriously as a business person – dress appropriately for your profession and make sure your clothes are new, clean, and fit you really well.

Colors? Earth tones can’t go wrong. Black, white, gray, brown, blue, green – we recommend that most people stay away from reds and oranges unless it’s just flat out their trademark color.

(Helpful technical photographer tip: As they make their way through various media, reds and oranges don’t always print red or orange – different magazines and newspapers have different levels of print quality – we’ve all seen that picture of the oddly red faced woman or man in the strangely purple toned red coat, haven’t we?

Don’t be that guy/girl, stick to the solid earth palette and some day write me an email and thank me for this great and sage advice.

That’s it for today – tune in next time for the all important “Day of the Shoot” – and have a profitable tomorrow.

Part One:

We all remember some version of the old sixties quotation : “If you love something set it free, if it doesn’t come back blah blah, yadda, yadda” and, although it has been overdone just a wee bit these last forty years it is a small kernel of truth and believe it or not, applies directly to the Zen of getting The Perfect Business Head Shot.

How?

“If you love something…”

That would be, in most people’s case, a picture of themselves that, for years, decades sometimes, they have considered to be ‘their’ shot.

They like their eyes, or their jaw, or the great background in this particular shot.

I know because they will often bring it in to show it to me.

They will tell me that this is the look they are trying to capture today and they will tell me off handedly what they like about ‘their’ shot but what they like the most, in my experience as a professional photographer, is the fact that in their perfect shot of their perfect jaw or eyes they are almost always substantially younger than they are when they arrive at my studio.

To get their new headshot, you know, the one that will replace their old, perfect headshot.

‘If you love something set it free…”

I’m talking about your youth, dear reader, you remember those great photogenic days of  carefree, unlined faces, eyes not yet reddened and creased, hair still all firmly in place (all of it) you remember don’t you?

Well in our quest to get to the very core of the Zen of the Perfect Business headshot, we must first face one uncomfortable, incontrovertible fact:

We don’t look like that anymore.

We still look good but we don’t look like that anymore.

Now before you click off in anger, before you rush to the bathroom for another layer of youth-a-nizing face cream consider this: no one wants to buy a home, or a car, or even a decent refrigerator from a kid.

Most of us in the business world are grownups and given a choice we prefer doing business with other grownups, right?

Be proud of those wrinkles. Let your weary face work for you. You are older and more experienced therefore you are smarter and better able to handle the complexities of business than some child…okay so the kid’s got pictures of herself on her cellphone that look like magazine covers (see below) and the last snapshot you saw of yourself reminded you eerily of your grandfather FEAR NOT! Over the course of these next few blog posts I will guide to the inner peace required to capture the Zen of the Perfect Business headshot.

Either that or you can head over to Glamour shots and ask for the double soft focus filter, lots of backlight and maybe one of those cute little Zorro masks…

In our next installment: ‘Dress for Success’

(Or, ‘Family Portraits, oh the humanity’)

‘Kids in the Studio’ an innocuous enough phrase but, trust me, these are words that can make grown photographers shiver in their cargo pants, quake in their New Balance trail shoes, put the closed sign in the window and hide in a darkened dressing room till the kiddies have grown tired of smearing fingerprints on the front door glass and left.

Okay maybe a little bit of hype there but shooting kid portraits is not and never really has been for the faint of heart.

Doesn’t’ scare me though, and today I’d like to tell you why.

Here in my Nashville studio I am lucky enough to shoot with kids, not just my own, on a regular basis. It can be an ordeal, certainly. Nothing says “I don’t want to do this’ to a grumpy four year old like kicking over a light stand or (true story) trying to climb the wall BEHIND the seamless paper but, earlier hyperbole aside, most kids are happy to get their picture taken and a great many of them turn on the hambone jets within moments of coming in to the studio.

My son, John Robert, is a different story.

Slightly different, but different.

John Robert was born with the twin disabilities of Down syndrome and Autism. He is nine now, he doesn’t speak and he may never speak. He eats spinach right out of the can and vanilla pudding and mashed potatoes and not a whole lot else. He watches Barney DVD’s – cut with the occasional Spongebob or Dora the Explorer endlessly.

He is one of the world’s great huggers. He is a walking ball of love. He has no guile, no hidden agenda ever, no misdirection of any kind in his approach to life, he is incapable of it.

And what, pray tell, does this have to do with photography?

Over the years I have spent a fair amount of time in John Robert’s class and have had the opportunity to shoot, or sometimes try to shoot, a great many disabled children.

It’s hard.

It’s hard emotionally. My son is in the class with the kids in wheelchairs, the autistic screamers, the eye rollers, the droolers, my son is one of those kids.

It’s hard physically. Shooting a typical child will usually involve crouching or kneeling or sitting on the floor at different points but shooting a child with cerebral palsy, really getting down to the level of his wheelchair and staying there, trying to time the head swings and trying to figure out what sort of noise you can make to get him to really look at you, even if only for a tenth of a second, can take considerably longer.

And so I am a more patient photographer.

Getting the little girl who sits in the corner sucking on her hand and mumbling to herself to look up and truly show me her eyes takes intense concentration, once the camera is up to my eye it stays there, my entire being stays there because the glimpse she may or may not give me will be fleeting at best.

And so I am a more observant photographer.

Getting my son to stop climbing the ladder in my studio (a favorite pastime) or to stop throwing the reflectors around the room like Frisbees (another winner with him) and get up in front of the lights and then

stop

…and smile at me, really smile right into the lens is not really all that hard since John Robert knows that’s what daddy does and he’s actually been known to somewhat politely push a model off her mark so that the can stand in the lights for a few shots.

After all it’s his dad which kind of makes it his studio, at least that’s how he sees it.

But using the patience he and his classmates have taught me, and using the skills of observation he and the other disabled boys and girls in his world have helped me refine  can  often guarantee something better than just a quick snap of a fake, camera ready smile; they can often get me what I treasure most, whether I’m shooting either of my two kids or a friend’s children or a client I’ve just met:

They can get me a picture of who he really is.

It’s a funny thing but over the last seven years of shooting pictures professionally I have noticed that the busier I get – and we are BUSY thankfully – the harder and harder it is to just get out in the world with a camera and shoot for the sake of shooting.

That’s what got me into this crazy business, the love of wandering the world looking for unusual people and places to photograph…the art of it if you will.

You’d think that after weeks at a time of fifteen hour days, in the studio or on location, portraits or architecture, advertising or personal, the last thing a photographer would want to do would be to take more pictures but let’s face it, we all start out in the business with little more than the love of shooting in our hearts and I’m happy to say I still have it.

I just don’t get the unfettered chance to use it as often, that’s all.

It’s something I think we all need to remember, regardless of our profession:

The world is a strange and beautiful place, there is art around us at every turn and it is our task, maybe even our gift. to stop and see it as often as we are able, without thought of money, or gain, just because it’s there and it adds to our lives when we take the time to notice it.