Opinions and thoughts on theoretical photographs.

[deebeecee]

Say you are a photographer. Say that you also were doing a portrait of someone that was paying you to do said portraiture, and would be ordering prints made from the images, etc. Pretty much what any normal photographer would be doing with a client

Comments

[deebeecee]

Your thoughts pretty well echo my own - let folks tell me what they want from their photos and then deliver that as best I can. Listening to the customer is all important in getting this part correct. It's nice to get that feedback from people looking in from outside instead of me from inside my own brain.

I, too, dislike how I look in photos. I have learned, however, from some very good teachers in the photography world that photography is all about what you remember that you saw, not what you saw. If you find the right photographer, they will make you look good. Not fake or over glamorized, but good. All those Nat Geo covers? They never looked like that until a photographer remembered them that way and made his image match his memory. Same goes for all those models in the magazines. The right person behind a lens makes all the difference, especially if it's you in front of that lens.

[astrocrabpuff]

Agreed. I used to work for a photographer turned digital re-imager and I recall an ad campaign where he said something along the lines of "if they wanted a green couch they should have taken a photo of a green couch" - meaning, take the photos that are the best of the portrait in the first place because doing major re-imaging is a lot of work. Choose the best portrait from your shots first then offer the choices of touch-ups to the subjects.

[deebeecee]

Ha, I like your old boss's view. To me, there comes a point that with all the manipulation, touching up, rejiggering, tweaking and polishing - you should've just hired a model to stand in for you. Some things are difficult to reproduce, and do require some digital enhancement, but a slightly "punched up" version of reality is what I'm looking for. A little richer, a bit deeper, but still faithful to the real thing.

Unless they are paying realllllly well, then who knows...