Its hard to make a true portrait of someone you just met, Its almost as difficult as making a true portrait of someone you're close to and have known for a long time--I'll explain that some other time!) We have to accept that we need to shut ourselves down a little to listen and observe our subject. And we need to understand our own personality is what we use to make our work our own, but to achieve a true portrait we need to put as much of that person as we can find into the making of the work. We all have our ideas about our own way of doing things. I, like everyone else, can get stuck in my ways and work on auto-pilot. I do a great deal of thinking about this and try hard to shake myself up when I can. But its hard to catch yourself just doing something that is comfortable and then get out of that. I preach trying to capture the essence of a personality and a moment that tells the story or partial story of the person. I realized looking at my pictures of Dixie that I made for her to document her incredible work getting and staying in incredible shape for a mother of adult children that I was going back into my comfort zone of making pictures and perhaps not really paying close attention to the vibrant personality of my sitter. I tend to like serious images and not so much smiling. I feel smiling in pictures can be very fake if not done right leaving the image of the person flat in meaning. Our goal was to showcase her great shape, but we also wanted something that went beyond just pictures of her bod, but pictures of who she is. I have tons of serious shots, but only a few that i feel captured her great bright smile. We did I think accomplish our goal, but I always want to do more than just accomplish, I want to take it somewhere unexpected. When she gets back I'm going to offer her a second session to really try to capture what we did in a few images more in others. And I want to find that unexpected but very cool thing that we both will go---yep thats it--thats something!. These are a few quick looks from the session that produced what I think are still pretty cool photos, just want more--always want more! Photographs by Richard Sayer