Thoughts on the 6 pics of the same guy

[Joel Eade]

Maybe both?

You're right though.....why mistrust a total stranger coming in for a photo shoot? No one would.

On the other hand, even if I suspected they were feeding me a line of s$#t, rather than confront the person I would probably do the shoot to the best of my ability to please the client (another basic trait of a good photographer)

Who cares if it's truth or fantasy? As long as you don't mis-represent what you've done. No harm done after all. Another form of "glamour shots" perhaps.

[Busted Knuckles]

Perhaps it should be question that is asked. How is it that you would like to be portrayed? It is not my job to judge you, rather, you ask that I use my talents to produce an image pleasing to you, so what that might be? Your audience will be your judge, not me.

If it were photojournalism where there is an effort to tell a truth (there is really one, a dime has two sides, there are many opinions, there is only one fact(s)).

This effort wasn't photo-journalistic. I am not a portrait kind of guy - I did some 30 years ago, (oof I am old) but that was of people well known and asking for a portrait that supported their public persona.

[conropl]

Who cares if it's truth or fantasy? As long as you don't mis-represent what you've done. No harm done after all. Another form of "glamour shots" perhaps.

I think that is a far assessment, and I agree.

What bugs me about what this guy did was he skewed the data to justify his preconceived thoughts about peoples prejudices. It seems to me he had a mind set that people judge, or even worse discriminate based on preconceived mind sets. Then he set up a lie and went about proving it by playing off peoples naivete, trust, and unwillingness to be confrontational.

On the other hand, it does help to confirm something I have always suspected. That is, if an outgoing person comes in, spills their guts to a photographer, and communicates it well; it is going to be easy for the photog to develop a shoot in his head and the client will probably get good results and feel it represents him well. However, if a introvert/humble person comes in and has a hard time communicating or (more importantly) selling themselves, then that person may not end up with a good representation of them-self if the photographer was not able to get them to open up. And once again, the humble person gets the shaft. However, this is where a photographer needs to be a really good people person to effortlessly draw information out of people and assess what is important and what is not. The technical side of photography can be taught for the most part, but to be really good at portraiture it would seem to me that you also need to be a really good people person and great communicator in order to be consistently good across many different personalities. Probably the same for most good leaders.

Sorry... way off topic. The rant lives on.