How we do things

Masks and Manners, Spring 2022

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Well.

As of April 2022, our corporate clients appear to be relaxing somewhat with regard to COVID concern. Our valued, long-standing clients are returning to office life and now need to catch up with an extensive backlog of business portraits.

This is wonderful!
But…
We all know COVID hasn't gone away and there's still that lingering social awkwardness regarding masks.
Should I wear a mask, or shouldn't I?
If you notice me wearing a mask (not realizing that it's out of courtesy for you), do you suddenly feel like you should put yours on (for me)?

Awkward is almost an understatement.
Here's how the FayFoto Boston team is handling it.

  • We still arrive at a client's location wearing a mask, and we ask what the client is comfortable with. This is a moving target, because what might have been the case on a previous assignment might not be the case on the current assignment.
  • If the prevailing understanding within a given office is that masks are at the discretion of the individual, we will probably remove ours, certainly during set up and break down when we're alone.
  • But if our contact indicates that, regardless of the overall office policy, a specific individual would be more comfortable if we are masked we don't ask questions. Our mask goes on. Absolutely.

Everyone I have interacted with this Spring (2022) has ruefully acknowledged the lingering social awkwardness of mask wearing.
Everyone has seemed to appreciate my cautious and courtious gesture.
Almost everyone has indicated they are comfortable with us unmasked, but not everyone.

We recognize that COVID isn't gone.
Even for vaccinated and boostered people.
We recognize that we are an outside vendor, a service provider.
It only makes sense to err on the side of caution and respect.

When you book your next assignment with FayFoto Boston, don't hesitate to let us know what your specific professional community's policy is regarding mask wearing.

The Team Has Been Vaccinated

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The FayFoto Boston Team Has Been Vaccinated!

We are pleased to announce that the core members of FayFoto Boston have all received first and second vaccinations.

still life photo of camera, laptop computer, and hand sanitizerAlthough receiving our vaccinations is a huge milestone for us personally, masks and hand sanitizer aren’t a thing of the past. Please be assured that that client safety continues to be very important to the FayFoto Boston team. Although we have safely completed numerous assignments in the last year, we will continue to respect and abide by our clients’ specific protocols.

When conducting portrait assignments at client locations, interpersonal contact is limited to the person who escorts us to the room we work in and, of course, the individual(s) being photographed. Our photographers will continue to wear a mask throughout the assignment. We know to maintain a proper distance when showing the individuals their photos on our laptop for selections.

We are happy to answer any additional questions you may have. We are looking forward to working with you and your team when you get back into your office.

group photo of ribbon cutting ceremony
It is great to be back working and interacting with our clients!

Reactions When Viewing Portrait Images

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Reactions When Viewing Portrait Images

I readily admit that it’s very difficult to be objective when viewing a photo of yourself. We are nevertheless frequently put in a position where we need to ask a subject to not only look at the photos we have collected at a portrait session but, even harder, to pick the one he or she likes the best.

Hardly anyone says “Wow, don’t I look great?” because that would of course imply vanity.

When asked if I can add hair, or remove years or pounds, I smile and say, as diplomatically as possible, I left that filter back at the office.

Family resemblances are frequently noted. (“Wow, I’m looking at my Dad there.”)

Bad experiences with previous portraits also surface. (“Don’t make me look like a sack of rocks as I did in my last photo.”)

After hearing innumerable initial responses, nearly all of them humorous in a self-deprecating way, I decided to start a little list of my favorites. The one-liners are the most fun.

  • Impish
  • Tired
  • Disturbing
  • Coy
  • Shifty
  • Possessed
  • Deer in headlights

I just smile, say encouraging things, take some more photos, and nearly every time the subject comes to terms with what he or she is seeing.

Oh, hello…

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Eastern Milk Snake

The vast majority of FayFoto Boston’s work takes place in our clients’ office. That’s still the case, even in the present era of Covid-19. But with more staff working from home than ever before, the definition of office has become less defined.

Our photographer Lee headed off recently to do a headshot and personal branding assignment at the client’s home. Lee put together our standard setup inside, with studio lights and a background. Once the “standard” portraits were done, he was asked to do some more informal variations outside.

As Lee, the subject, and the subject’s spouse approached the porch, they disturbed an unexpected fourth party.
Lee later identified it as a harmless Eastern Milk Snake, but its brief presence did inject some adrenaline into the assignment.

As Lee tells the story, the snake scurried under the porch as the three humans approached. This was no big deal for Lee, but the homeowners were less than thrilled.

It’s a funny anecdote after the fact, but it points to the reality that today’s committed businesses are adapting to address client needs. FayFoto is one of those committed businesses.

Oh, and good for Lee, who had the presence of mind to capture an environmental portrait of an unexpected subject!

Covid-19 Safety Protocol Statement

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To Our Existing and Future Contacts and Clients:

Please be assured that we will be doing everything we can to ensure the safety of your team.

It’s a strange new environment in which to do business which involves direct contact with people.
But that’s the business FayFoto is in, and that’s what you have relied on us for in the past.
We want to be sure you know we take the Covid-19 environment very seriously. Your safety is at the forefront of our mind.

First, we want to know what your specific workplace safety protocols are, so we can anticipate and meet them with a minimum of delay on the day of a photo session. Any documentation you can provide will be added to the records we keep internally.

Even without that client-specific information, you can be assured of the following:

  • We will bring only the minimum amount of equipment necessary into your environment
  • We will wear a face mask while interacting with your team members.
  • Only one member of the FayFoto team will be present at an assignment. No assistant, no stylist. If a specific assignment requires additional personnel for any reason, you will be notified in advance.
  • Our team works out of our own homes now, so we don’t gather together physically. If one of us feels ill another will be available to cover your assignment.
  • We won’t touch your team members, even to pat down hair, straighten neckties, or greet with a handshake.
  • We will do everything possible to maintain safe distance while reviewing portrait captures. If necessary, we will email proofsheets instead of asking subjects to make a selection at the photo session.

It honestly feels so strange to have to express what should be  commonsense points explicitly, but we do want each of our clients and contacts to know that we have thought through the present and future workflow thoroughly. It’s not going to be as easy or as casual as it was, but we are prepared to do what it takes in order to provide the reliable photography you have counted on in the past.

Client specifications

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collage of lighting diagrams

Client Specifications

Please note that this article is directed at corporate clients. We’re accustomed to getting a tight layout from advertising agencies. We are less likely to interact with a creative director in the day-to-day interactions with corporate marketing and practice development professionals.

This topic is on my mind because this year we had one client unhappy over an apparent misunderstanding about who was supposed to silhouette the subject (the client or the photographer), one new client who didn’t have a clear idea of what would best suit their various needs, one client for whom the background brightness and color specification turned out to be exact and inflexible, and one new-ish client who asked to have revised files because they neglected to mention that their primary presentation is a circular crop.

FayFoto Boston takes pains to provide images which meet client needs. Almost none of our clients need the same thing, so today I’m thinking about how those requirements can be developed and communicated.

Matching or Developing a Style Spec

What do you need from your photographer? At FayFoto Boston this matters, because we’re in the business of giving you what you need. If you know your requirements in concrete terms, and can communicate that to your photographer, the odd are better that you’ll get what you need on the first try.

Long ago in the days of film…

…when a 5×7 black and white print was ubiquitous (at least for business headshot portraits), things were less complicated.

In today’s digital era, with so much marketing taking place on the internet and with every website striving to be at least a little bit unique, conventions don’t exist like they used to.

If I’m expecting you to use a portrait as a traditional vertical rectangle, cropping a bit into the shoulders, but your design presents bio photos in a circle (or, even more unexpected, a horizontal rectangle), what I send you might not be ideal unless you tell me in advance.

How does a client convey specifications to a photographer?

The information our clients provide comes in various ways.

  • Sometimes we’re provided with a detailed specification in the form of a PDF document developed by the client’s creative department. (One of our clients, bless them, took this up a notch by providing a clear cropping guide in the form of a Photoshop file, including clear guides for head size and placement. Amazing.)
  • Sometimes we’re shown an image to match, or a URL to reference.
  • Sometimes we’re asked to make a recommendation.

If you are a new contact, reaching out to FayFoto Boston for the first time, expect to be asked what you need for a final product. If you don’t know, see if you can find who does. Failing that, we have some generic defaults.

Generic vs. Specific

If we aren’t given any specifications, our default for a business headshot portrait is to photograph the subject against a charcoal gray background, and send a JPEG file saved as a vertical rectangle at 4×6 inches at 300 dpi. That default works well for general PR usage but…

  • unless you have someone in-house who can resize an image, that’s quite large for a web page,
  • gray might not match preexisting portraits on your website, and
  • a vertical rectangle might not be the ideal shape. Why? Because if it turns out you need a square (or a circle) and we have cropped to a nice vertical rectangle, the rectangular crop might not leave you with enough room on the sides to get a comfortable square crop.

Providing Multiple Versions

It’s not at all uncommon for our clients to request multiple versions of each finished image. For example, we might provide a square crop for a LinkedIn profile, another version for a web bio page and a third for print and press releases. We can give you just about anything you need if we know what that is, preferably before taking the pictures!

FayFoto Boston will help develop a spec if your marketing department doesn’t have one

Here’s a bit of reality: every client has a specification, even if our direct contact doesn’t know what that is.

It saves everyone time if you can clearly communicate your needs for final product in advance, before the photo session.

Absent a clear specification, we are more than happy to make suggestions. Here’s one example we proposed to a new client. For each selected image, we will provide the following variations:

  • 500px square for LinkedIn, “LastName_FirstName-linkedin”
  • 200x300px for web use, “LastName_FirstName-web”
  • 4”x6” at print resolution for press releases and media distribution, “LastName_FirstName-print”

Bottom Line

In order to get what you need from your photographer most efficiently it’s critical that you share your requirements clearly. And if you don’t have requirements, ask your photographer for recommendations or live with that photographer’s best guess. If your business is in the metropolitan-Boston area and you need portraits of your team, we invite you to get in touch. We know this discipline, and we’re happy to provide you with exactly what you need!

Getting to “Yes” with a Business Portrait

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Wayne reviews portrait options with subject

I should state right from the beginning that, unlike our colleagues who serve the editorial or advertising markets, in most cases our business portraits are taken without the direct supervision of an art director. We often receive detailed style guidelines from a creative director, but most of the on-site interaction occurs directly between the subject and the photographer.

This means that, under normal circumstances, the subject and the photographer work together at the time of the photo session to arrive at a selected image which is then optimized at our office and sent to our contact for publication. (There are exceptions, such as when we have to photograph a lot of subjects in a short timeframe. This article deals with the more common business head shot portrait assignment in which we have the luxury of 10-15 minutes with each subject.)

How do we make this work?

The majority of our business headshot portraits these days are taken with the camera attached to a portable computer. This allows us to invite the subject to review and select his or her favorite right then, at the time of the photo session. (See ”Why” below.)

We work with a lot of senior-level executives. These executives have important things to be doing, and “picture day” is pretty low on the priority list. Given that we typically have 10-15 minutes with a subject, this means we somehow have to get to a yes in a short period of time. How we get there is as much of an art as is the lighting and the choice of lens.

With rare exceptions, the average subject shows up announcing that he or she would prefer dental surgery over sitting for a business portrait. We get it – it’s awkward and intimidating to stand in front of a stranger while trying to present your ideal persona in a photo which may represent you for years. But by now we have heard this so many times we don’t get discouraged. We bring positive energy to the situation.

Personally, I don't fire away, taking dozens or even hundreds of pictures, hoping that the odds will be with me and at least one will look good.

Usually between 15-20 exposures are enough, with pauses along the way every 6 to 8 shots to evaluate what's happening and allowing for course corrections based on what the subject and I are seeing.

That’s an average of course. For some, as few as 8 is plenty. The most it has ever taken me is 150. (Seriously.)

My colleagues and I at FayFoto Boston do this a lot. We bring confidence and enthusiasm to the situation. And yes, we make flattering and encouraging remarks (“You look good today!”) And yes, we coach the subject (“Shoulders are great, but turn your head a little this way”).

Lee reviews portrait captures with subject
Lee reviews portrait captures with subject
Then we sit the subject down at the laptop and a little bond develops. This isn’t a smart phone snapshot – he or she does look good, because we have lit them well. But if the subject isn’t happy we make it clear we’ll keep working. Once the subject realizes
that he or she can have some input on the outcome…
that this experience is a collaboration, a partnership…
that we are here to make her or him look amazing…
a truly palpable change in the energy and relationship emerges.

I have observed that my colleagues prefer to take pictures until they are satisfied they have captured some great images. They then sit with subject to identify the one. Personally, I prefer to start off with fewer preliminary photos and show them to the subject right away, to get a baseline. Either way, the process allows us to experiment with variables such as

  • whether to go with our without glasses,
  • whether that sweater or wrap works, or
  • whether a woman prefers her hair arranged one way or the other.

Why select on-site?

We work with busy professionals. The highly optimized approach described above has evolved over years to meet time and workflow expectations.

  • Our contacts are generally keen to get the finished image quickly. Having the selections right away means we can start post production right away.
  • Our contacts are not interested in pouring over dozens of options for each subject.
  • For most subjects, the motivation to make a selection immediately dwindles to zero when they are given the option of deciding later.
  • It is extremely efficient for the subject to select at the time of the session. Contrary to what you might imagine, the best image turns out to be pretty easy to spot.

When it doesn’t work

The process described above works beautifully more than 96% of the time.
But what happens if the subject experiences what I call “decision remorse?”
Or if the subject’s spouse, or mother, or best friend snickers at the selection?
Well, that’s why we never discard anything usable. Blinks and half-blinks are tossed; the rest of the images from an assignment are archived along with the selected images. A proof sheet of additional options from the session can be generated to allow the subject a second chance at deciding. This doesn’t happen often, but it happens often enough that we have learned to keep the out takes.

Get in touch

If this workflow appears to be better suited to your needs than what you are currently experiencing, FayFoto Boston is easy to get in touch with. We would love to have a conversation.

Labels, Distinctions, and Discoverability

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We take a lot of professional photos of and for business executives.

I personally prefer to label what we do portrait photography.

That label feels more dignified and valuable than another (more common it turns out) label, head shot.

For the longest time we resisted using the latter term. It seemed superficial. It felt like slang. It felt like what aspiring actors and models seek. It didn’t seem business-like.

But when Google’s pay-per-click advertising began to sound like a practical sales and lead generation tool for our company, I began to listen more closely to the language our clients commonly used. Language they and their peers would presumably therefore use in online searches.

You saw this coming, didn’t you? “Headshot” is what most people seem to call what we do. Or maybe “head shot” if spell check disapproves of the concatenated variant.

So much for dignity and value considerations.

Go where the searches are

When it comes to marketing a professional service, it’s important to see beyond your personal biases or industry-insider terminology and stay attuned to the common vernacular. Potential new business from search results makes this seemingly subtle difference more significant than simply “You like tomato and I like tomahto.”

For that reason our web site now uses both forms. If you discover FayFoto Boston while searching online for a headshot photographer, we are more than happy to provide a solid business portrait of you or members of your team.

But is there a difference?

Is the distinction between a head shot and a portrait merely semantic?

Well, actually no. Not in my mind anyway.

The difference comes down to time and attention, both in the image capture and the post production stages.

A Head Shot can be thought of as a high quality ID photo

Let’s say you have a large group of people (imagine a sales meeting, bringing employees from all over the country together in one place). Or you would like to add photos of a department’s worth of people to an internal intranet. You want to have a presentable photo of as many as you can. You need to move along, though. You allocate 5 minutes per person. We can do that. We’ll still bring studio lights and a background, but there isn’t time for the subject to review and select an image. In such cases we frequently edit each subject’s images to 5 or 10 per person and either send you a PDF proof sheet to select from or just simply send you moderately sized and cropped JPEG files of the whole bunch. In the latter option it’s on you to decide which image to use for each person. We will apply color and exposure corrections and custom cropping, but that’s it for post production.

For some use cases this is entirely sufficient.

This would be a headshot.

A Portrait affords more time with the subject and more post production

On the other hand, let’s say you present images of your firm’s Partners or executive leadership team to the public on a web site. Presentation of these executives reflects on your company. The image may also be used for press releases or LinkedIn profiles in addition to the company website.

In such a case it’s more appropriate to schedule 10 or 15 minutes per person, allow him or her to review the captures, take more photos if necessary, and approve one. Significant care and attention is paid to every inch of the image in post production. Several variations of crop and resolution may be applied to the final image to comply with various media specifications.

That, in my mind, is a portrait.

Evaluate your needs

Give some thought to what your needs are realistically. Then give us a call and outline your needs, expectations, and budget. We’ll work with you to give you what you need – nothing more but most certainly nothing less.

Professionals Do Sweat the Small Stuff

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The popular phrase “don’t sweat the small stuff” might be good advice for a happy life, but you may be sure that phrase was not coined by a professional photographer.

Why hire a professional in a trade?

Why? Because for professionals in any given discipline, it’s all small stuff.

When you hire a professional, you assume that person or firm will attend to details you might not consider. You can be confident a professional knows the tools and knows how to be business-like.

If that professional is a plumber, it might be tight solder joints.
If that professional is a woodworker it might be perfect dovetails.
If that professional is a roofer, it might be sealing the roof/chimney joint.

Professional photographers likewise look for the things a non-photographer appreciates subliminally but might not be trained to pay explicit attention to. It’s less about the equipment we bring and more about the experience we bring.

For portraits, we look at hair, highlights, and neckties.
For product, we look at angles, texture, and intersection.
For interiors, we look for stray wires in the corner and cushions askew on the sofa.
At events we are attentive to distractions in the background. (You know, the hilarious lampshade on the head.)

Professionals don’t have supernatural powers. We have just learned to look for things other people might not pick up on.

Like what?

Let’s consider portraits

If that professional is a corporate portrait photographer it’s looking for fly-away hair, shiny foreheads, loose necktie knots, and glare (or smudges) on glasses. It’s sensing when the subject is anxious and uncomfortable, and helping them get past that. It’s making sure garments look crisp, necklaces are centered, and a myriad of other small details.

Consistency from session to session, year to year is another mark of a professional corporate portrait photographer, because it’s not uncommon for firms pitching a new account to assemble a team using photos taken many years apart.

And then there’s post production

Post Production is what happens between the image capture and the image delivery.

No matter how careful and attentive the photographer is at the photo session, final touches applied in post production are equally important to the final result. Since corporate portraiture is a significant part of what FayFoto Boston offers (as distinct from fashion or editorial portraiture), let’s look at …

Some examples

I do a lot of business portrait photography, and I do most of the post production on the images my colleagues and I capture. In case you ever wonder what the value of post production is (or why retouching might be an additional fee) I’ll show you a few examples to illustrate why hiring a professional can be money well spent. All of these examples are tightly cropped to preserve the anonymity of the subject while at the same time illustrating one specific area. The differences are obvious when you look at the before/after views, but in real life it’s only the retoucher who sees the difference. Your audience only sees your personnel in their best light.

By the way, none of these corrections were done at the special request of the subject. This is just what a professional who is proud of his or her product brings to the craft. This is what you can expect when you choose to work with FayFoto Boston.

local retouching refinements to portrait image
Smooth the shoulder, trim the neck and tighten the necktie!
retouch chapped lips
Digital lip balm
hair at neck removed
A subtle trim
bump removed from suit jacket shoulder line
Refine shoulder line contour
retouch fly away hair spikes
Hair will do what it wants to do

 

Sometimes at the end of an editing session I say “you’re welcome!
But only to myself.
To say it out loud wouldn’t be… professional!

Keeping Track of Client Details

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Whatever the business term is for a business that’s smaller than a small business, that’s what FayFoto Boston is. We have a full-time staff of three. However, even three is a lot more complicated than one when it comes to saving, retrieving, and sharing information each of us know individually. We have many of the same needs as any of our larger small business colleagues. We just don’t have the resources for enterprise-level solutions. Consequently, to keep chaos at bay we have developed numerous DIY solutions.

Client Preferences

We operate in the B2B sector. We don’t offer packages as a wedding or family portrait studio might. Every one of our clients has a slightly different preference, either for background, or file size, or both. It’s not uncommon for a client to ask for two, four, or even more variations for each selected portrait image. Web, print, LinkedIn, color, grayscale… Each with specific pixel dimensions, and often at different aspect ratios. And each variation has to have a consistent file name to indicate unambiguously what it is. (“lastname-firstname_web.jpg” or “Firstname-Lastname_print.jpg” for example.)

In other words… instead of telling our clients what they can have, our clients tell us what they need. And it’s on us to deliver that repeatedly and consistently.

Read more

FayFoto’s Negative Archive now lives at Northeastern University

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boxes of FayFoto negatives stacked in hallway

FayFoto has been involved with Boston’s business, political, advertising and public relations communities for…
well…
we’re not entirely sure of the year of origin but we’re going with 80+ years.

We covered many assignments and produced many many images over the course of those decades (estimated at over 7.5 million negatives!). Our collection of negatives from the late 60’s until about the early 2000’s (when we transitioned to digital) is essentially unbroken. We also had several metal file cabinets filled with much older negatives that aren’t catalogued in any coherent manner.

We’re not hoarders exactly, but neither are we librarians or curators. Our collection hadn’t been maintained for posterity – photographers are pragmatic and we kept them mainly because someday maybe someone would buy a reprint from an image captured back when.

It is a unique time capsule…

Because we aren’t trained to be information specialists and because we don’t have resources to become that, this collection was effectively useless. Our logs maintained a good record of when an assignment took place and who our client was, but very little else in the way of metadata about the images. In other words, locating and retrieving a negative based on its content rather than an internal reference number stamped on the back of a print was next to impossible. Our logs from that era were hand written, so they couldn’t be quickly or easily searched. The cardboard boxes we kept them in weren’t in any way archival, and they consumed significant space.

What to do?

This is where Northeastern University comes in. Giordana Mecagni, a conservator in the Special Collections division of Northeastern University’s Snell Library reached out to us thanks to a timely referral from a contact at the Boston Public Library who was aware of our situation. As soon as we learned of the breadth and scope of the Library’s collection (which includes the Boston Globe’s archive!) we knew our collection would be in the best of all possible hands.

boxes of negatives in moving van
FayFoto’s negative archive is neatly packed in a moving van

Archivist Daniel Lavoie made several exploratory site visits to our office and on June 5, 2018 the collection rolled off in a moving van to a new home and a productive future.

Here’s a link to the story from the Library’s perspective entitled “FayFoto archive acquired by Northeastern University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections”.

FayFoto Boston is grateful almost beyond words for the Library’s willingness to undertake the daunting process of sifting, sorting, organizing, and ultimately making these images available to historians and researchers. We anticipate that one day someone out there will discover just exactly the image he or she is looking for to tell a story about some aspect of Boston’s history during this era.

A new beginning, not an end

This isn’t the end of the story for FayFoto Boston! We continue to produce new work for businesses and organizations in the Boston area – digitally. It does, however, feel like the beginning of a new story for our older images.

Start Here

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If you are a business professional who works with photographers… Start Here!

Blog posts by their nature get pushed down as new articles are added.

While we would like to think that everything we write has value and is useful, we do have some foundational articles aimed at professionals who work with photographers. We want to ensure that this “evergreen” content remains visible and accessible.

A Brief Index to Helpful Content

Here’s a short list of articles we feel are of particular value to business professionals whose job involves working with professional photographers.

Related to Business “Head Shot” Portraits

Setting Up a Photo Session

Other Topics