Unique Home Furniture, Home Decorating and Home Decoration Store
Taking A Portrait: Some perceptive institutions are making a good thing out of advertising themselves as the "full-service bank." Many photographers would be wise to follow the same line. If there is a portrait to be made in your community, you should want to do it, ranging from the dowager who drives up in her Cadillac down to the junior high school girl who wants a billfold for her first boyfriend. Treat that girl right and the chances are good that she will be with you for a long time.
Don't even shy away from taking a portrait "ping-pong" pictures. Your public knows the difference between those prints at a few cents each and the artistically matted and framed heritage portrait you sell for several hundred dollars.
Good salesmanship is so important that it might be worth your while to consider taking a portrait on just the right man as a partner, to do all the selling and bookkeeping and handling of reorders and all other business details, so that you would be free to concentrate altogether on the creative and artistic end of the portrait partnership. If you are able to find a really good businessman for a partner, you may be sure that he will contribute his full share to the success of your enterprise. Financial success in the portrait field these days is, in the final analysis, probably more a matter of merchandising than of photography.
Theatrical portraiture has always been a fascinating and profitable field for photographers situated in the principal centers of population, particularly Hollywood and New York, but recently the field has expanded with explosive force. The expanding influence has been, of course, television.
However, although a long focal length lens is mandatory, it need not be expensive. The utmost of critical sharpness in a portrait lens is not necessary, or even desired, since considerable diffusion can be tolerated in portrait negatives. Your lens needn't be in a shutter for strictly studio portraits, either. A lens in barrel is perfectly satisfactory, since you can provide yourself with a simple Packard shutter to use behind the lens. Many portrait men actually prefer the Packard to the more costly between-the-lens shutters. |
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