So, today we’re going for another trip to the softer side of photography. Specifically we’re going to talk about portraiture, and the importance, benefits and winsomeness of meeting your clients before you shoot them, instead of just emailing a bit back and forth. If you take a couple of minutes and read through the post, and implement some of it into your workflow (if you haven’t already), I promise you it’ll make your portraits more personal, more intimate and just make for a much more pleasant experience during the actual shooting session. So, without much further ado, a couple of lists of reasons for, and ways of making the most of, meeting your clients before you shoot them. This week I’ve even tried to cut down on the fluff words (tried being the operative word here).[Read More…]
Andreas Bergmann is a Copenhagen based photographer working mainly with portraiture, stage arts and commercial photography. That is when he isn’t spending all his time on crazy art projects that he dreams will one day be his main area of work. He writes about all the softer non-technical sides of becoming, and being, a photographer. And can usually be found either on his Andreas Bergmann is a Copenhagen based photographer working mainly with portraiture, stage arts and commercial photography. That is when he isn’t spending all his time on crazy art projects that he dreams will one day be his main area of work. He writes about all the softer non-technical sides of becoming, and being, a photographer. And can usually be found either on his Facebook page or his website. Today we’re going to talk about letting go of your zoom ring, moving your feet and dealing with a habit a lot of us have, me included, the habit of shooting the same safe shot over and over again. I realize I’m generalizing here, but most photographers have “safe shots”, shots they know how to pull off 10 out of 10 times, shots they know will please the client and shots that will put money in the bank. Now let me be very clear from the get go, this is a good thing. I know that a specific light set up, a specific vibe at the shoot and a specific way of asking questions and talking to the client will get me a specific kind of portrait, that makes people happy. I’m so dang happy that I have those set ups ready to go, because a bunch of times those shots are exactly what the client want, and other times when my head just isn’t working and I’m not feeling it, I can use those setups to make a shoot work. What I don’t like is that I have at various points, and I assume I’ll get there again, been stuck in only shooting these safe shots. It is an easy place to get stuck because you know the shots work, and you know you aren’t risking messing the shoot up. But if you get stuck there, you stop developing your vision, and that is a really bad thing. So, without more intro-ado, let’s get to the point of the thing, stuff that I know have helped me a truckload with getting out of the safe-shot-rut.[Read More…] Hi there DIYP readers. I’ve been given the aaaawesome honor of writing on a regular basis for the site, so I figured I’d start out with saying Hi! so… Hi! I’m a portrait and commercial photographer out of Copenhagen in Denmark, and I’m going to be writing mostly about the terrible, hilarious, funny, complicated, hard, easy, scary and hopefully immensely satisfying life of freelance photography, and the pitfallsm trials and triblations of said life. For my first official posts here I figured I’d start out with something utterly soul-crushing, so portfolio-building it is! One of the most terribad, and important, and hard, and good and wonderful and soul-crushing things one has to go through, on a regular basis, is redoing one’s portfolio. I tend to ignore it a liiiittle too long, and suddenly I look at my current website and go “Darn, this isn’t representative of my work at all anymore… time to go through that horrifying exercise in soul-crushing again”. Usually this is encouraged by a “gentle” prodding from my producer. I’m going to go over how I build portfolios, why I do it that way, and share some random tidbits and pointer I’ve picked up over time. (Note: I use lightroom for organizing my photos, but this should apply to aperture and bridge too.) Now, whenever I get home from a shoot, I do a pass of the images where I basically select “stuff that is good enough to present to the client”. This basically lets me go back and select all the images that I in some way think “work”, and are good enough to be seen by anyone besides me. Down the road this process forms the basis of my portfolio building. If I relied on choosing from the “final client pick” images I’d be missing shots I really love, that somehow just didn’t fit the client’s needs, so my initial pool for portfolio building is “stuff that is good enough to show the world”. For reference I usually end up with between 5 and 20 shots from a portrait shoot, and less than that for pr/branding shoots. If you pick 100 shots from each you’ll be going through a TON of images down the road… so that might not be very… pleasurable. Starting with my initial pool of images from above, I do a very fast, and very rough, pass where I basically pick every image that ressonates with me in some way. I don’t do technical nitpicking, I don’t do long inspections, play around with different color gradings or any such thing, I just go by whether or not the images makes me feel SOMETHING when I see them, well… something besides “How on earth did I end up picking this image? this is utter maneure!”. I do it by basically looking at the images in full screen mode, and quickly tapping the next-image key, and then just pressing the hotkey for “add to collection” whenever I get a reaction to an image. No pausing, no thinking or anything like that. The reason for doing this pass first, and doing it fast and sort of in a winging-it style, is that I want to pick all the images that has an immediate effect, because obviously I want people looking at my portfolio to react to the images in it. I want them to want to click the images and look at the big image, and I want them to feel something. If I get bogged down in technical nitpickery or analyzing the images I’ll loose my initial reaction to them, and it is the initial reaction I’m looking for. How many images I end up with after this pass is basically a crapshoot. but anything beyond 100 images per category (for me; portraiture, circus, theathre, dance & music) means I do another pass of the same kind. After having completed the initial pass, I create a gallery for each catergory and throw it online in a password protected folder on my server. I then link this galler to a select group of people and ask them to pick their favorites. I explicitly tell them that I don’t care whether it is 0, 10 or 50 images that are “their favorites”, but that it should only be their favorites. Who these people are is the important part. I have a few people I show all the galleries, a couple of photographers I look immensely up to, who for some reason are willing to help me out with this, a few ADs, and my mother who is a ridiculously good art critic (yes, you may point your finger at me and laugh now. On top of that I also ask people that are specific to each category to look at them. Like… for my circus images I ask a couple of performing circus artists, a couple of circus directors etc. to look at them and so on and so fort. I then gather up all their favorites which nets me a nice list of images sorted by “most favorites”. There are several reasons for doing this. Firstly it is important to get some eyes that aren’t my own on the images. I have emotional connections to all my images; maybe the shoot was particularly awesome to be part of, maybe I made my first big paycheck with the image, maybe I have a secret crush on the person I did a portrait of. I need someone who is ignorant to these connections to look at the images. Beyond that the specific people are chosen for a specific reason. It is important to note that I don’t follow these “votes” or what you might call them blindly. Often I am in agreement with a lot of the picks, and if I am in direct disagreement, it is a very good reason for me to ask people why they picked the photo and reflect on why I wouldn’t pick the image. So besides helping out with the portfolio making, it is also an awesom excuse to get some reflection on my work and opinion done 🙂 So, this is where it starts getting painful. Usually I have a bunch of picks for my portfolio that are from the same shoot. Some shoots are obviously better than others, and from my best shoots I often end up with 2-5 picks. Unless there is a very very awesome reason for it, I don’t think it is a good idea to have several photos from the same shoot in a portfolio, so I have to get rid of some. This can be excruciatingly hard, but it has to be done, so I just hunker down and get choosin’. Some things I tend to keep in mind during this part is to make sure that I don’t always pick the same type of crop / composition, to avoid the portfolio consisting of basically the same kinds of images. That I never ever allow an image to stay if I’m going “hmm, is this okay for the portfolio?”, and that, especially for portraits, I don’t have several images of the same client fron different shoots, unless they’re very good images and very different images. So, after going through all this, I’m usually left with around… 30 odd images for each category, and I reeeeeeeally want to shave it down to around 20. Now, 20 isn’t a magical figure or something, it is just what feels right to me, and a good incentive to cut even more surperfluous stuf from the portfolio. Now, beyond being just a collection of “best images evar that X has made”, a portfolio is also sort of a story. It has to flow from one image to the next, and be a nice experience to go through. This was obviously more important when we only had books, since people click around freely on websites, but it still matters. The visual flow throughout the thunbnail gallery, if you use those, still matters. And the overall appearance of the portfolio still matters. So the task in this final part is twofold, it is both about getting rid of the least good of the best, but it is also about getting rid of the images that down’t fit within the flow of the portfolio, and about ordering the images for the portfolio. I find it almost impossible to give specific technical advice on ordering your images, because it is really about how it “feels” to go through the images, but there are some pointers I find helpful. So, I hope that all made sense and was helpful, besides the run-through of how I do it and why, there are some general pointers and rules of thumbI’ve picked up from photographers much better than me, books and other sources. So it isn’t “awesome shit I made up”, I’m just conveying what I’ve been lucky enough to have been taught over the years 🙂 Andreas Bergmann is a commercial photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. You can follow his work on his blog or his Facebook.About Andreas Bergmann
Stop shooting the same shot over and over again
How To Survive The Agonizing Process Of Building A Portfolio
Before even starting
Getting emotional – the initial selection
Getting democratical – the outsourcing part
Picking my favorite child – getting rid of look-a-likes
The final countdown – Building the final story
Random tidbits and pointers.
About The Author