They say to dress for the job you want. When Logan came over to my table at Panera before our session, it really looked like the president was coming to my table, and it was a little intimidating.
We had decided on a location, but upon arriving at that location, we saw a sign that said that professional photographers had to have a permit to take pictures there. We quickly came up with a Plan B: Furman University was about 20 minutes away and I already knew I liked shooting there after doing a session there with Tracy.
How do you pose someone who wants to be President of the United States? Like a President of the United States! A lot of my sources of inspiration are actually hanging in the White House or the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. I think "normal" photographers find inspiration from places like Pinterest, but they probably didn't grow up in Virginia and see portraits like these in person on practically every field trip.
I thought that we would stick to the poses from the more modern presidents since a lot of the older ones are either just generic headshots or poses that looked old-fashioned and uncomfortable. We were surprised that our favorite pose out of all the portraits of presidents we looked at was from an 1880 portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.
One of our favorites ended up being the pose from John F. Kennedy's official portrait. Not one for something like a headshot, but it's iconic because it's different.
Since presidential portraits usually are released about a year or two after the term ends, we can't look to Obama's for inspiration yet, so George W. Bush's portrait was the one released the most recently. I remember all the talk about how his portrait was so different from the presidents who came before him because of how casually he chose to pose for it in comparison to his predecessors.
This was definitely a little out of my comfort zone since my portraits aren't normally this formal, but I guess having the future president in front of the camera made it easier.
It was so much fun to do Logan's portraits, and you'll be seeing these from me again as a throwback anytime LBK gets elected to office.
