How to be photogenic: tips from a dog

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard, "I'm not very photogenic, so good luck taking my picture," I would have a heck of a lot of nickels.  As a photographer, I recognize the simple fact that some people are just more photogenic than others.  Yes, that's right.  Someone whose business is in getting paid to take good photos of peoples' faces just admitted that some peoples' faces look better in photos than others.  I have just admitted what we all know but don't dare say out loud.

I'm not saying that some people are uglier than others- I believe we are all individuals with our own personal looks, styles, and ways of expressing ourselves, and in my own neo-modern-hippie way, I believe we are all beautiful.  And finding a way to translate your personal look into a great headshot people will appreciate before they actually meet you in person is the real challenge when having your portrait taken.

I believe in 2 steps to making yourself more photogenic when a camera points in your direction, and the first, most important step I learned from photographing my dog.  That step is to be yourself and relax.  My dog doesn't give a crap what his photo looks like or even what a camera is, so he doesn't change his face or expression one iota when a giant lens is looming over his snout.  When you have your photo taken, don't try to aim your face at "that one angle that made my nose look great in that one photo of myself I saw 10 years ago."  We've all been there, and it results in 10 years of photos of us looking awkward tilting our head in weird angles. 

When you're having your photo taken, own it- just smile, be yourself, and believe you are the beautiful, confident, capable person you know you are, and you will look beautiful, confident, and capable in your photo.  When other people look at photos of you they're not looking at your hair, your nose, your eyebrows, or any individual feature.  They're looking at the overall photo as a representation of you and are only determining if you seem friendly, approachable, capable, professional, etc.  Focus more on how friendly you want to look in the photo and you won't notice anything else!

The second step in being more photogenic in my opinion is retouching.  Before any purists get upset, I'm not talking about crazy, body-image altering glamor photos that completely change an ordinary person into Cindy Crawford.  Because you still want to look like you so someone can look at your photo then pick you at a networking event.  I'm talking about maximizing the effect of the friendly, approachable photo as a whole by minimizing the effect of certain things that distract from the friendly, approachable reading you want people to get out of looking at your photo. 

Taking a 3 dimensional face, which people read as 3 dimensional in person, and making it into a 2 dimensional picture, which an eye reads as 2 dimensional when it's seen, can distort our features and enhance things we don't usually see in person.  Our eyes filter through shadows under the nose and skin imperfections in person because we see it all the time and read right through it to get to the business of communicating with the person themselves.  But we don't have this in-person benefit in a photo, which is a flat, artistic representation of a person. 

And if anyone is aware of this it's me- one of my eyes always looks bigger than the other in photos but not in person.  Am I supposed to say, "that's me, but I don't actually look like Quasimodo in person, I swear," when I show my picture to someone who hasn't seen me in person yet?  Nope.  And I gave up trying to squint my big eye to match my small one or angle my head in juuuuuust that right direction so they look the same size.  I've already got 10 years of photos of my head at weird angles.

I'm taking a tip from my dog from now on and suggest you do too: What camera?  I'm just going to sit here happy and confident and smiling and if there happens to be a record of that confidence in the form of a photo, so be it.  And if that photo happens to make those dark circles under my eyes look darker than usual, then send that thing to the retouching department!

The photo vault: ghost town photos

Orval "Hoppy" Ray, 2006

About 6 years ago a friend and I took a random road trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma to hunt for ghost towns.  It sounds like a weird idea now and it was probably a weird idea then.  We had the notion that we would take hundreds of amazingly brilliant photos of Old West style storefronts, boarded up and with tumble weeds blowing past, and maybe even abandoned wagons and buggies or anything that looked like we might have stumbled on the set of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." 

Instead, we found something we weren't expecting to find: people.  We met several people still living in what the rest of the country titled "ghost towns;" towns with no post office, any open businesses to speak of, barely any public works departments, street lights, police and fire departments or any of the other things that put a cluster of buildings on a map.  Most of these towns had been boom towns of some kind- they had struck oil or zinc or some other resource, became a quick town years ago, then the population either slowly or abruptly receded when the business left the town.

The town that fascinated us both the most was Picher, Oklahoma, just against the border to Kansas.  Picher became an instantaneous town in WWI when a zinc mine opened and hundreds of thousands of people lived and worked there.  After the war and zinc was no longer needed in such quantities, the town's population dwindled; but shot up again during WWII when the mine bustled again.  And then again, the population numbers dropped.

In the center of what used to be the heart of the town we found a storefront that was still open.  It was a pool hall/music venue/museum operated by a man named Orval "Hoppy" Ray.  Hoppy lived in Picher his whole life.  His father was a miner during WWI and he was a miner during WWII.  In one corner of the store amps and microphones were set up: every Monday some of the old timers got together and played country bluegrass music.  Hoppy complained that some old lady always came to sing and was so lousy she should probably stay home.

The rest of the store had several pool tables set up and some glass cases with mining tools, pieces of rock and ore, and tons of old photographs.  Hoppy had tacked photos all over the walls and had boxes and albums filled with photos that went back to about the time photography was invented, including large panoramas of group photos of town council members, schools, miners, and more.  He told us stories of the mine until the sun started to set, and a handful of locals came in to play pool while we talked, then joined us in looking through photos when Hoppy started to unroll long, sepia-toned panoramic shots of the first time the town was actually called a "city."

Here's where the story gets sad... Hoppy had terrible things to say about the Army Corps of Engineers.  He said that the mine under the town was unstable.  Huge sinkholes opened up regularly, chemicals and excess minerals had been leeching into the water supply for decades, causing illness.  The town was supposed to be an Army Corps Superfund site: where the federal government funds a massive cleanup and develops a plan to get the area back to tip-top shape.  But Hoppy claimed they were misusing the money and not making a difference.

Around the time we were there most of the residents had left but people like Hoppy who lived there since birth and wanted to see the town shine again were hanging in there as long as they could.  The town became divided: there were those who took the buy-out money the government offered to purchase their land and help them relocate so they can bulldoze the town, and those who wanted to stay put.  Apparently we had just missed an independent film crew who came through to make a movie about it.  It's called The Creek Runs Red, and they got Hoppy to narrate it.  I saw it on PBS about a year later.

I only bring these photos from Picher out of the vault to look at them now because my traveling buddy, Josh, just sent me a link to this New York Times article today, which talks about Picher's sister city, Treece, Kansas; and how both Treece and Picher were eventually bought out to be closed up forever.

Photos on a 52 year old camera

I decided that as the weather warms up in (cold, blustery, wet, and windy) Chicago I should get out of the studio and take some fun snapshots around the town.  But after spending most of my days with a 21.1 megapixel two and a half pound digital SLR strapped around my neck this year, I kind of wanted to leave my usual camera behind this time.

Just like any good photographer... okay, let me rephrase that... Just like any unnecessarily nerdy photographer, I had about 8 or so vintage film cameras in my collection to choose from.  Should I take the 1960's Nikon with pop-top, waist-level viewing?  Or what about the 1981 Chinon?  A lesser-known brand of its era but with some of the best optics and metering out there. 

Then I remembered "Mr. Brown."  Several years ago (okay, probably 7) a friend and I were doing some thrifting in a resale shop when I found "Mr. Brown" on a shelf wedged between some books and broken radios.  "Mr. Brown," as I call it, is a Kodak Brownie Bulls-eye camera, manufactured between 1954 and 1960.  I bought it for $2 and haven't gotten around to testing it out.  Until last weekend.

Jamming some film in "Mr. Brown" and testing it out remained on my to-do list for 7 years because it doesn't eat normal 35mm film, or even normal medium-format 120 film for that matter.  Medium format 120 film is the proper size for the Brownie Bulls-eye, but it's spooled on size 120 spools, and these cameras take 620 spools.  Which are no longer manufactured. 

So where does someone go to find the proper food to feed a 52 year old camera?  A 113 year old camera shop.  I figured if anyone knew how to get a hold of 120 film on a 620 spool it would be Central Camera- the oldest camera shop in Chicago.  I've been going there for years, but since I packed up my darkroom (temporarily- some day, somehow, I will get it back...) I haven't stepped through their doors in quite a while.

I asked if they had 120 film spooled on 620 rolls.
"There's only one guy in the country who re-spools those things and sells them..." said the film guru behind the counter, "and we stock his stuff." Of course they do.  Central Camera is awesome.  I kind of feel like I need to say that again.  Central Camera is awesome.

So last weekend "Mr. Brown" was fed his proper film food and took some of its first photos in probably decades.  Here are two of them- processed and printed by Central Camera (which is awesome).  I had them request that the lab return the extra 620 spool so I can experiment with my next adventure: re-spooling 120 film on the 620 spool myself so I can feed "Mr. Brown" regularly and do this again.

My neighbors are goofballs

My neighbor's Latin combo band, Street Sounds, needed some new group shots for press, artwork, and bookings; so the other evening we wandered to an empty lot and took some photos. 

It was great to get out of the studio for a bit and trample through some weeds and a little light rain to earn a good photo.

The only difficulty was... well... the band.  I had them hold some instruments as props but about 15 seconds after they picked them up they started playing them.  In this shot to the right they had just started messing around and playing a bit of a song.

Then they wouldn't stop.  And they wouldn't look at the camera.  Did I mention it was raining a little?  So I had them drop their instruments for some shots without them- thinking that the instruments wouldn't be there to distract them from the business of having their photograph taken.

They just goofed around with each other instead.

A haiku to hair

Today I wrote a haiku to hair:

Hair, you are so strange
one day you look so lovely
the next, oh so lame.

When preparing for a headshot portrait session a lot of us make a laundry list of all the things we hope look okay. We hope our shirt isn't wrinkled or that we brushed all of our dog's hairs off it. We hope our eyeshadow isn't creasing or our mascara isn't mysteriously flaking off and leaving little black snowflakes on our cheeks. We hope we remembered to trim that one little nose hair that always sticks out of that left nostril...

On top of that list is almost always our hair. Oh, hair. That pile of filamentous biomaterial emanating from the dermis of our scalp which causes us so much heartache. We wash it, dry it, spray it, curl it, flatten it, tease it, dye it, and otherwise attempt to torture it into the shape we want it to take. And it usually resists.

So what do you do when your hair isn't doing what you want it to do for the one hour you want it to look perfect (during a photo session)? You get a photographer who understands your pain and looks out for your hair- making sure it's not covering your face, sticking up like Alfalfa's hair, or being otherwise totally disobedient.

And then you chill out! Smile through your crazy hair because when someone looks at your headshot they shouldn't even be looking at your hair anyway- they should be looking at your friendly, approachable personality radiating from your smile and drawing attention from everything else in the photo to your smiling eyes.. Unless you have hair like the B-52's. Then people will notice your hair before your face.

Headshot photo booth! And bacon-wrapped dates.

Last week I partnered with a legal publishing company hosting a networking event for attorneys and provided a little "social media photobooth" in a corner of the room, where attendees can stop by and have their headshot taken for a fraction of the price of an in-studio session.

It was a lot of fun and great exercise for a headshot photographer like me since I've got about 3 minutes to get a great photo of each person. And after the event, the feedback has been spectacular. Today someone called me to tell me he was "fully expecting to hate every last one of the photos and didn't even want to look at them online... but I couldn't believe it- I liked them all! Even my wife likes them and she hates everything." :)

I'm having trouble deciding what was my favorite part of the whole experience:

1. Meeting great new people
2. Great feedback from people happy with their photos already uploading them to LinkedIn
3. The appetizers at the event. Those bacon-wrapped dates were AMAZING.

What not to wear for a headshot: episode 1

I have a few rules for choosing clothing to wear during your headshot. One of those rules is this: no t-shirts with stuff on them. Stuff like logos, crazy patterns, glitter, bows, splatters of mud, or anything else that distracts from your face.

A headshot should be a photo of your head, and anything else in the photo- the background, your clothing, jewelry, etc.- should be incidental and exist only to frame and compliment your face. Anything that steals the show from your face is a no-no.

If you see your t-shirt before you see your face, then it's got to go. Change, that is. Being shirtless for a headshot is also a no-no.

Check out these examples-- in the first photo, her face is competing with the awesomeness of a giant griffin fighting a dragon on her t-shirt. If you're put into an empty room and there's a young woman standing in one corner but and a griffin fighting a dragon in the other corner of the room, which corner are you going to be looking at?

Don't let your face be upstaged by a griffin.

And the second photo is pretty self-explanatory. If you're going to wear a t-shirt with someone's logo on it, you might as well be selling their product in the photo, and not your own face. Now excuse me, I suddenly want a refreshing carbonated drink...

Can't decide what you look like?

Most people are not like my dad, who has had the same haircut since the late 1950's*. We like to change our look here and there and even on a daily basis... one day we've got a beard, the next day it's a mustache. The day after that it has vanished to mustache heaven.

Although I wear contacts 95% of the time, I walk my dog every morning before I put my contacts in, and I always see the same early morning commuters and dog walkers around the neighborhood who only see me in my big, black librarian glasses and red and white knitted hat. They must think I always dress like I'm in a "Where's Waldo" book.

So how should your headshot look if you've got so many different looks? I always vote for the majority. (we're not talking about political stances, by the way, just portraiture trends.) If you usually wear your glasses when meeting your clients for the first time, then wear your glasses in your headshot. If you're usually clean shaven and only sport a mustache to go with your Tom Selleck Halloween costume, then leave the mustache at home for your headshot.

Or in some cases- if you're an actor and want to have multiple looks for different types of auditions, then take photos with all those looks so you'll have a big pool to choose from. Auditioning for a lumberjack role? Send them that bearded headshot! Trying for the part of a young librarian? Send them the naked cheeks and spectacles look!
*true story.

Spit out your gum.

There's nothing worse than an amazing photo of yourself where your smile looks so perfect, your eyes sparkle, your head is titled in just the perfect angle that makes your nose look so cute... but there's one little hair sticking straight up. Or one little fingerprint on your glasses. Or one little fuzzy from your sweater resting on your lip.

Or one little glob of bright pink chewing gum mashed between your teeth.

Sometimes we can stress ourselves so much about having our photo taken- timing the next haircut and color perfectly or when to trim or shave the beard so it's just perfect at the appointment, or choosing just the right shirt that brings out those itty bitty little blue highlights in your eyes...

For me it's generally about seeing the forest instead of the trees. People are drawn to portraits of friendly faces that catch your attention because of the warmth of the smile and the natural, confident, comfortable ease in their face. It's the overall tone of the image that's the most important in making it successful in grabbing and holding someone's attention.

But something that distracts from that will ruin it and cause the viewer's eyes to go to that one spot in the photo- instead of to the whole photo. Something like a huge, sparkly piece of jewelry, or bright purple polkadots on a tie... or a piece of pink gum poking out of someone's mouth.

So before you have your portrait taken, spit out your gum.