When I’m doing portraiture, it’s really common for people to express that they feel overwhelmed by the expectation. The best way to sum it up is that they feel scared that they’ll be the cause of the photograph not working out well. There is a huge cultural hangup in people older than 30 around being photographed.

I believe that film photography is the cause for the bulk of the trepidation we feel around being photographed. Film carried a finality about it that was brutally unforgiving on many levels. Back in the day, a film may have had as few as twelve exposures. TWELVE! The only tool that could take photographs was a camera, and that was all it did. So you’d specifically have to carry around this specialised tool that would normally only be used once or twice per outing. It would have to be a very special occasion to shoot a whole roll of film at a single event, and then, because a camera was used so minimally, people would struggle to remember how it worked. It was common for people to have a film in their camera for months before they had shot the whole roll. Then there was the cost. Each photograph you took was expensive and every shot cost you money, even if the prints were blurry.

It’s hard to fathom now, but taking photographs and being photographed with a film camera, required both concentration and cooperation so it often became a pressurised situation. Think about that. Normal people would be feeling pressure to be good models without any idea what was required of them. They were being put under pressure by an amateur photographer whose main concern was trying not to make a mistake and waste film rather than offering adequate instruction. To add to the drama, once the photo was taken there was no way to know if it was in focus, well exposed and well composed. You had to wait however long it was until the film was finished, and from there, wait until the prints came back. If you wanted to get an important shot, a lot was riding on that one opportunity. Landing a good photo on film, really was some kind of miracle. 

On some levels, it’s about undoing the conditioning we received from the people who took our photos as kids. Digital has eliminated more or less all of the pressure formally associated with film photography. We are free to keep shooting until we have something that looks good and we can assess it in real time.

This pressure around getting portraits done is still evident in people's reactions now. I have made a point of telling people that as subjects, they can’t get it wrong as such. I’m only looking for a couple of open and natural images and as the subject, the way to do that, is for them to do what they were doing on the way to the shoot; being themselves. Most of us aren’t that glamorous and most of us aren’t trained in modelling but I know for a fact that my absolute favourite portrait photos are the ones that truly embody the character of the subject. As humans we resonate with other people's energy, so while there is definitely a place for sophistication, an open honest smile is often more enchanting.