Nearly everyone who sits for us says the same thing in the first minute: I am terrible in photographs. They are not. They are being looked at by a stranger holding a machine, and the body reacts to that before anyone has pressed a shutter.
Standing empty in the middle of a room is hard. Leaning on a table, holding a cup, adjusting a sleeve, walking to the window and turning — small tasks take the attention off the face, and the face softens as soon as it is no longer being managed.
We ask about the work, the house, the drive over. The answers do not matter. What matters is that someone thinking about an answer stops arranging their expression, and the frames from those seconds are the ones people recognise as themselves.
Ten minutes in we turn the screen around once. Seeing a picture they like resets the whole session, because the fear is almost always about how they imagine they look rather than how they do.
The moment after someone thinks the frame is finished is when the shoulders drop. We keep the camera up through that pause. It costs nothing and it is where a good half of the final gallery comes from.
We book longer than the pictures need. A session with a gap in the middle for a coffee produces something calmer than one run to the minute, and calm is most of what a portrait is made of.