Three things professional portait photographers hate
Have you ever wondered what infuriates a photographer?
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Where we love our jobs but no matter how much we try to ignore a couple of things, they can still irritate us, sometimes! So, here’s an insight into five things professional photographers love to hate within the portrait industry.
1. GIFS
Yup - those annoying moving, 2-3second clips really gripe on a tog (so does the word “tog”, to be fair!). It may be the fact that Facebook chose to buy the creating company, Giphy, in May last year (2020) and it’s fair to say that we, along with many others have a strong dislike to Mr. Zuckerberg and his social media platforms (find out why, here!) but that’s a debate for another day. Don’t get us wrong, we’re all up for self expression and freedom of speech - it’s why we are called Be Bold Be You - but, for us, it’s the ownership of the imagery used… It can seriously degrade the individual in the GIF and most don’t usually know that they’ve been turned into a GIF for the world to use and, sadly, abuse. In 2015 the, then, Chief Operating Officer of Giphy, Adam Leibsohn, explained “Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” in an interview with the New York Times back in 2015 however we’d prefer a row of cartoon based emoji’s to copyright infringment and/or use of a person’s identity without their knowledge any day.
Image found via Google images
2. Cartoon animal noses & ears digitally put onto human faces
Yeahhhh - you know the ones! You can take a selfie and then add bunny ears, oversized eyes and a sparkly nose to your face. Erm, why? It’s all good fun and stuff but it completely devalues the sentiment attached to portrait photography. I did a blog, earlier this month, where we looked into the importance of printing imagery… Would my 16yr old niece recognise a floppy disc and it’s importance to data transfer within the late 1900’s (yup - I really did word it that way on purpose!). She probably laugh and enjoy pinging it, thinking it was some sort of fidget cube toy not realising that on that little plastic square are images of her family in their younger years… Hell, even USBs are on their way to becoming extinct with computers now being released without USB ports. So - where am I going with this? Let’s be honest, nothing beats the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction a printed photograph can give you. It may be the memory linked to the photo or a shot of a loved one that you are especially proud of and we all want those memories to be preserved well. So, when you’re reliving a memory do you really want it to be covered over by a stupid dog nose and massive ears hanging over the faces of the people you cherish most? Nope - neither do I.
3. App based filters
Sit down for a second and buckle yourself in for a basic, quick, social science lesson! Have you ever heard the phrase “mirror image”? It’s the image that the mirror sees, not what the world sees. This is because a mirror (and photo!) inverts the image… To quote Wikipedia, “A mirror image is a reflected duplication of an object that appears almost identical, but is reversed in the direction perpendicular to the mirror surface.”. Because we’re able to see ourselves every day, in either a photo or a mirror, that’s the image we have created of ourselves but, that is not the face the rest of the world sees! However, it doesn’t look right to us, and, as a result, tricks our brain into thinking we look “less attractive” even though to the world, that is how our face looks.
These wonderful ladies volunteered their before & afters after I asked for some help through our #BBBY facebook group. Thank you all for proving real women don’t have plastic skin!
Phew… Science lesson over. So, how does this relate to photographer's hating filters? Well, remember the last paragraph and then add on the skin soften tool. It’s creating an image that, quite simply, does not look after the individual. The more filters applied, the more we convince ourselves that that is how we look and therefore, every time we look in a mirror or see an unfiltered image, we start a negative association with our own body image and this is not a healthy attitude to have! The filter is not only a concern for the negative impact around our mental health but also how it can have social impact on our societies through social media. When a photographer says “no” to turning a portrait into something the camera didn’t see there’s a huge risk of it being both detrimental to the client and that own photographer’s business and reputation however, I think, the photographer would deserve a medal for nurturing the client and ensuring they see their natural beauty, and not a digitally induced, 2D like, character change that these filters seem to create.
