Why Portrait Photographers Don't Need One Signature Style

I photographed a client in 2022 who said something offhand that stuck with me for three years. This week she showed back up in my inbox out of nowhere. I do not believe in coincidences.

This episode is about why I have never been a one style photographer and why I never want to be. Thirty years behind the camera means I can shoot studio, natural light, editorial, motion blur, bluebonnets, Capitol staircases, and everything in between. I am a Manifesting Generator, more on that soon, and doing the same thing on repeat would drain me to death. A challenge energizes me. A client with a vision is my favorite kind of session.

We are talking about the Pinterest board process, the Laguna Gloria and Capitol session that inspired this episode, and why range is actually a brand strategy, not a lack of one.

Links in the show notes for senior portrait and headshot inquiries.

Senior Portrait Photography: jamapantel.com/senior-photographer-austin
Editorial Seniors: jamapantel.com/editorial-senior-portraits-austin
Headshots: jamapantel.com/headshot-photographer-in-austin

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"I decided to stop performing and start telling the truth."

Transcript

A Compliment That Never Left

Jama Pantel 0:00

In twenty twenty two, I photographed a client who said something offhand after her session that I have never forgotten. She was looking through her images, thrilled with everything we got, and she just said it casually. You are an expert in both indoor and studio lighting. That was it. No big speech, no formal compliment, just an observation from someone who had worked with me long enough to notice. That comment stuck with me for years. And then this week, completely out of nowhere, she showed back up in my inbox. I don't believe in coincidences, so here we are now.

Why Photography Still Lights Me Up

Jama Pantel 0:40

Hey y'all, it's your podcast Bestie Jama again, and today we're taking a break from my health journey. I have spent the last several episodes being very honest with you about some hard stuff, and I'm grateful for all of y'all tuning in. But today I want to talk about something that genuinely lights me up. Today I want to talk about photography. Yes, y'all, I still run a photography business. Specifically, I want to talk about why I'm not a one trick pony and why I never wanted to be. You

Rejecting The One Style Rule

Jama Pantel 1:12

hear something a lot in the photography world. If they don't like my style, they're not my client. And I get it. I understand the logic behind it, niching down, finding your signature look, building a recognizable brand around one aesthetic. That works for a lot of photographers. It has never worked for me, however, and for a long time I wondered if that meant something was wrong with me and what I was doing. It does not. It just means I'm wired differently. And I know I am. So I'm a manifesting generator. That's a human design thing, and I will be doing a whole series on that soon, so stay tuned. But the short version of that is that I am literally wired to work across multiple things at once. Doing the same thing on repeat drains me. Variety fuels me and what I do. The moment I understood that about myself, so much of how I have always worked started making way more sense. One style for thirty years would bore me to death. A challenge energizes me. A client who comes to me with a vision I have never executed before is not a problem. That's my favorite kind of session. Looking at an image and being able to deconstruct how it was captured, the which way the light was coming in, how the client was posed, all of that lights me up. Doing the same thing over and over is not mastery, it's just repetition. And after thirty years of this, I need more than repetition to stay excited about what I

What Real Range Looks Like

Jama Pantel 2:55

do. Let me tell you about what range actually looks like from behind the camera. Studio light, natural light, blue bonnets in a field at Golden Hour. The Capitol staircase in downtown Austin with dramatic shadows falling across carved wood in a way most photographers might walk right past. Yeah, that's kind of my jam. Motion blur inside Laguna Gloria, a girl in a ball gown spinning across the black and white checker wood floor, the whole image moving like a dream. Headshots that make people look like the most confident version of themselves. Editorial seniors that look like they belong in a magazine, not a picture in a shoebox. Did I just date myself with that? Do people even store pictures in shoeboxes anymore or

Learning Taste And Timing Early

Jama Pantel 3:45

is that just me? Cause I do. I did not learn all of this overnight, and honestly, it goes back further than my business. In college, I had a photography class where we submitted work every week to be judged by both our professor and our peers. One spring break, I went down to the beach, okay, probably more than one, but I asked this tall, muscular, very good looking friend of mine to pose coming out of the water. I shot it on black and white film, you know, went to the lightroom, developed it, did all the things, and presented it to my class. Every single girl in the room voted it as a top image of the week and could not believe I had friends who looked like that. Was it the composition? Probably. Was it also the subject matter? Big, absolute yes it was. But I knew what I was doing when I took the shot, and I knew it was going to stop everyone. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but knowing how to capture it, that is the skill. And I have been doing that since before I owned a digital camera. Thirty years of showing up, trying things, failing at plenty of them, and getting better at all of it. That's what range actually looks like. That is what happens when you never stop being curious about what else is possible. I can walk into almost any situation and figure it out, because I have probably already walked into something harder. So

Turning Pinterest Into Real Moments

Jama Pantel 5:18

here's how it actually works when a client comes to me with a vision. They usually end up sending me a Pinterest board or some pictures they screenshot it off of social media. A mood, a handful of images that they saved probably at two o'clock in the morning because something about them felt like them, like who they wanted to be in the photograph. Like the version of themselves they have not quite stepped into yet. And my job it's to look at that board and to translate it into something real, something for them. And it's not simple skill. That requires again knowing how light works and how people work, and how to read a space for what it can give you, and also how to build trust fast enough that someone relaxes in front of your camera and the images stop looking like photos and start looking like moments. I just came off of an amazing senior spring client sessions, but the most recent of those sessions

Laguna Gloria And Capitol Case Study

Jama Pantel 6:20

really made me want to record this episode. Laguna Gloria and the Texas Capitol started exactly that way. She sent me a Pinterest board, she had a vision, a ball gown that she purchased specifically for this, a moody interior, something editorial and unexpected. I'd photographed her family in natural light every year for years now. She knew what I could do in that setting, but this was totally different. She wanted something else entirely and trusted me to figure it out. We got the motion blur shot inside the house on the Laguna Gloria campus. It has this beautiful checkerboard floors. We got dramatic staircase at the Capitol with the light doing exactly what I needed it to do. And of course I knew where to look. I spent a lot of time in that building. We got the window light portraits that looked like they were pulled from an editorial magazine, and she loved every single one of them. Because the images look like her vision, not mine. My job was to serve what she came to me with, and that is always what I try to do. Just this week I booked a high school senior for both fall and spring. The mom looked through my entire portfolio, so much of it, all the locations, every kind of session, and she said she could just tell my work was different from everybody else's. And of course she's like, I don't know what it is, if it's your lens or something, but she knew what she wanted for her daughter, and she knew I was the one to do it for her. That is what thirty

When Clients See Range Clearly

Jama Pantel 7:55

years of not being one thing looks like from the outside. Someone looks at your body of work and they see range. They see intention. They see a photographer who has never stopped learning, never settled into a formula, never decided that good enough was the same as great, and they booked me because of it. And that booking made my weak, honestly. It made me want to record this episode even more than I already did.

Let Range Be Your Brand

Jama Pantel 8:22

So if you're a photographer who has been told to niche down, pick a lane, find your one signature style, and stick with it forever, I'm not here to tell you that that advice is wrong. It works for a lot of people. But if it has never felt right to you, if the idea of shooting the same thing the same way for the rest of your career makes you want to quit before you start, maybe just maybe you're wired differently too. There is a version of this career where your range is your brand, where the fact that you can do everything well is the thing that sets you apart. That is the vision I am living, and I would not trade it for anything. So give me your vision and I will execute it. That's what 30 years looks like. And if you're a senior or the mom or dad of a senior looking for something that actually looks like your kid and not like every other senior portrait you have ever seen, I'll link to my senior photography page in the show notes. Come and find me if you want to. And that's about all I've got for now. Until next week. Bye y'all.