So there you are, looking through the expensive bit of glass on the front of your camera at two people you hardly know, thinking how do I make them look good?

Strangers in a viewfinder by Johannes van Kan

Is it a trick with the light?

Is it a ‘looking good’ filter under the Artistic Filter menu in Photoshop?

Is it making them really, really small in the image so you can’t tell anyway, but man oh man that scenery is spectacular?

Is it that they paid you SOOO much that they believe they will look good regardless of what you do, a bit like the ‘Emperor’s new photographer’?

Is it that the photograph itself looks good, so by association/participation so do they?

Or is it that you have taken the time to understand them and get to know them? And from this relationship there has come a ‘trust’, and from trust has come a confidence that will always make them look good.

My favorite hate is photographs of people staring at cameras.

Somewhere there needs to be a relationship … so at worst it would be two people staring at a photographer (at least there would be a human element, but these people should know that it is rude to stare). This relationship is something you are photographing. Not your relationship with them, but theirs with each other. How do you do this? We use hypnotic babble. which is really hard to explain but distracts them from their fear of photographers with big cameras.

So here is the question. “Who are those people on the other side of the lens?”

What do you know about their wants, needs and dreams? And how are you, as the photographer, going to go further for them?

Here’s Part 2.

Johannes

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