I was hired to take a portrait of Paul here (the man) along with Sam (the dog). Here's the image Sam liked best:
It's a little hard to see in this small version (you can click to enlarge) but Sam's thinking was that he looked kind of cute with just the one eye open and that in black and white the white of his eye made him the centre of the action, which being a dog, is just what he likes. The problem was Paul (the man with the money) didn't agree. Not at all. He wasn't sold because he actually thought Sam the dog looked bad in the image above, not himself at all. He felt the better image was this one:
He felt this second image was 'more like Sam'. Which leads us to the question of how Sam could possibly be so wrong about his own portrait? Well, it seems like quite a puzzle until I tell you what the more astute readers will have already guessed: that it wasn't Sam at all who liked the first image, it was really, um, me, the photographer, which leads us to our lesson.
To get a good portrait you have to know something about your subject, you have to talk with them, watch them, and while I did speak with Paul and have on more than one occasion, for obvious reasons (I hope they're obvious) I've never spoken to Sam the dog. To get to know a dog you have to spend lots and lots of time with him, and if I had known Sam better as Sam and not just some dog, I would have immediately sensed that the first image was just all wrong.
Now if I could just get Rogers to show up when I'm home....
