In my career (39½ years and counting) I have shot a lot of portraits and probably as many headshots. I’m not going to go back over my definitions of either or the subtle differences between them right here but when I point my cameras at the subjects there’s one question that I get asked. A lot.

“How should I look?”

For the first bit of my career I didn’t have a stock answer so I would often turn the question back on them: “How do you want to be seen?” It worked sometimes, occasionally failed miserably but mostly solved nothing. “Just relax and pretend that there isn’t a big bloke with a big camera and a few lights pointing at you” was never going to become the simple and snappy response that I required. It didn’t even worked on the few occasions that I tried to inject some humour with it.

I started to make mental notes about who asked the question, what kind of person they were and one thing started to become really obvious – those who had been photographed professionally a few times before rarely asked whilst those who hadn’t often did. Not entirely surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

At that stage in my career I had joined the staff at the Times Supplements and a big percentage of the people I was taking pictures of were teachers and lecturers. It wasn’t that they were lacking in confidence, it was just that they were in a situation that was very unfamiliar to them and so they regularly reached out and asked for help with the “how should I look?” or “how do you want me to look?” questions.

The mental note taking continued and I began to notice that women were far more likely to ask. It wasn’t completely clear cut but the gender variation was there and so I decided that I needed a way to put people at their ease, give them instruction and be completely professional all at the same time. I went through a few ideas and then, completely out of the blue, it came to me just as I was about to shoot a column header portrait of a colleague (as it happens, a very nervous man).

“Calm, confident and in control”

From memory, it just came out like that. It worked, the colleague commented on it and that was that – I had my catchphrase. I have used it time and time again ever since. At one stage in my more recent career I even considered getting the message printed onto a t-shirt so that I could simply point to it when the inevitable question came up. That was a pretty silly idea because I tend to wear smart shirts to work and nobody wants to see the photographer stripping off his shirt (and tie) just to see a silly message printed on the t-shirt underneath!

About a dozen or so years ago I was shooting some corporate portraits and the question was asked and answered. The woman that I was photographing was a fairly senior executive in the UK office of a well-known brand. She heard my response, laughed and asked the follow-up question “what on earth does that look like?” I was a bit stumped by that because nobody had ever questioned my catchphrase before. Thinking on my feet (and capitalising on my luck that she wasn’t the first person that I had shot that day) I showed her a picture on the back of the camera of her (male) colleague and said something like “similar to that, but with your personality rather than his please”. Happily we both laughed and the rest of the shoot went well and, most importantly, the client booked me again and again afterwards.

So what does “calm, confident and in control” look like? It turns out that it is harder to put into words than you can imagine because personality, status, the reason for the picture, age and several other factors come into play. So, in no particular order, here are some bullet points based on my thoughts and experience:

• It’s not usually smiley but it can be.
• It’s rarely deadly serious but it can be.
• It’s usually looking directly into the camera but it doesn’t have to be.
• It’s best to appear natural but there are exceptions.
• It’s something that you know when you see it.

If nothing else, the catchphrase has become a talking point on quite a few occasions. The most memorable of which was when I was photographing the world famous mezzo-soprano, Dame Janet Baker. Unusually for someone who has spent their life in the spotlight she asked how I wanted her to look. I replied with the, by now, well-worn “calm confident and in control” and she laughed before telling me that I should “patent that line – it’s very good”. I never did but I hope that by sharing it here it will have many more years of use by me and by others in search of something to say to hesitant people about to stare down their lenses.