(This is my eleventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
There’s a guide by Pye Jirsa on headshot photography over on SLR Lounge. As someone who doesn’t do a lot of portrait photography, it’s a good read.
What strikes me is how different this is to what we experience with school photos.
School Photo day is a mass disruption to the school schedule. The photographers have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time and teachers just accept that maybe we’re not going to get our lesson done for every class we see.
I’ve got the steps down for school photos. Sit on the stool. Place your feet on the marker (this turns you to the side for a 3/4 view), if you’re wearing glasses, tilt your head down so there isn’t a glare.
You can ask for a retake but it’ll look the same as the first one.
If you’ve read through the SLR Lounge article, you may have noticed a lot of things have been left out. Perhaps the contracted photographers would care about that if they weren’t photographing 500+ students and their teachers, but they just don’t have the time.
The article even includes advice for having an actual conversation with the subject. That’s not happening when photos are being taken on the stage in the cafeteria during one of the lunches, I assure you.
If you have the idea that school photos don’t turn out nearly as well as professional headshots, well, you’re darned right. For all of the expertise of the school photographers, they’re not given the time or environment to output the same quality.
Switch over to what I do in my classroom. Students learn by doing, as any art teacher will tell you. Early on in my digital media arts position, I decided that meant more assignments would equal more learning.
In some ways, it did. Student had a homework assignment video due every week, and every two weeks they had a more intense project video due. It was a lot of work, and the ones who managed it learned to streamline their workflows to get things done on time.
Many corners were cut, but what we didn’t understand was that those corners were load-bearing. An unscripted, unplanned video by an 11 year old is exactly as high-quality as you think it is, because they don’t have the 10,000 hours needed to do that without a script.
I’ve been doing this for a bit longer, now, and I’ve learned to know better. Students still have a project due roughly every two weeks, but it might not be a video. There’s no homework that’s labeled as such, though they may still work outside of class.
The learning is still happening. There’s actually more learning taking place, because those corners that were being cut were load bearing, but they didn’t have the time.
The quality of the work has also predictably improved, and they’re getting more awards for their efforts to prove it.
There’s still the complaint that they have too much work, but these are 10-13 year old kids. If I asked for one video a month I’d get the same complaint. (In fact, this has happened.)
I think about this when I read news stories about companies giving employees more work to improve productivity. I’m not sure it’s understood that if you scrap your quality, what you’re producing isn’t worth selling.
As I said, the corners that get cut are sometimes load-bearing.