Reality is almost never our friend. Your goal is to make all your subjects look as good as they think they look...



Almost every person has something in their appearance that they would change if they could. There are two general types of problems that you will come across when working with your clients. These are the imagined problems and the real problems.
The “imagined” problems are normally found in very attractive, very photogenic clients. Usually these problems are very slight. Most of the time the person who has these problems is the only one who can actually see them with-out a lot of careful searching. These problems are the hardest to correct because most photographers never take the time to speak with their clients about such issues before their session. Since no problems are readily apparent, the photographer doesn’t give it a second thought. A typical imagined problem is something like, “One of my eyes is smaller than the other,” “One of my ears is lower than the other,” or “My smile seems crooked.” As you look for this “freakish abnormality,” you have to study the problem for
several minutes to figure out what on earth the client is talking about.
Women are more prone to imagined problems than men, for they feel they have to live up to a higher standard. You know the double standard—a chubby guy is “stocky” while a chubby woman is “fat.” A mature man has “character” while a mature woman is just “old.” Many women feel that they must look like the girl on the cover of a fashion magazine, while most men feel they don’t have to look any better than the guy next door (although this is rapidly changing as guys are also becoming more and more imageconscious). This is a primary reason why I have used women for the majority of the illustrations in this book.
The second reason is the fact that women generally wear clothing that is more revealing than men’s clothing—meaning that any figure flaws they may have are that much more obvious. Guys’ clothing, on the other hand, is usually loose and helps to conceal some problems. The “real” problems are the issues that each and almost every one of us has. We are never as thin as we would like, we think our noses are too large, our ears stick out too much, and our eyes are too big or too small. These problems are easier for most photographers to correct because
they are more easily identified as things that need to be disguised in the final portrait.... Jeff Smith.