The Patience Transfer
How I work
I’m a patient person. Not performing patience, not reminding myself to slow down. Just wired that way, which I recognize is not universal and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I don’t rush shelter animals in sessions because I’m impatient to get to the next thing on a to-do list. I don’t really operate on to-do lists in any meaningful way on a session day, which probably says something about me, and is, I'm told, an ongoing frustration for my wife. If an animal needs time, we take time. I’ll push a comfort zone occasionally, because a photography session is genuinely outside what any dog or cat could reasonably call normal, but pushing a comfort zone and rushing are different things.
What the shelter taught me, though, is that being patient and appearing patient to an animal are not the same thing.
You can be waiting in a way that transmits urgency. The posture is right, the pace is right, but something underneath is impatient, and animals receive that signal with a directness that humans are too polite to acknowledge. The dog doesn’t ignore it. The dog goes further into the corner.
I’ve been volunteering my photography services to animal welfare organizations since 2005. That’s not a credential the way MFA is a credential or CPP is a credential. It’s closer to what happens to your eyes when you spend enough mornings photographing animals who have no stake in cooperating with you. They can’t be coached before the session. They can’t be reasoned with. “We’re just going to do a few quick shots for the website” is not a phrase that lands with a dog who arrived three days ago and has spent most of those days unsure about the nature and intentions of every person who walks through the kennel door.
What you learn, over enough of those mornings, is that comfort isn’t something you can explain into existence. You build it through behavior, through specific behavior, over specific time. The animal watches what you do, not what you intend. The shutter sound either becomes routine or it doesn’t, based on how many times you’ve fired it with nothing bad following, not based on whether you told them it was going to be okay.
This is one of the places where mirrorless cameras changed something real. An electronic shutter fires in complete silence. No mechanical sound, no auditory signal, nothing. The first time you photograph a cat using silent mode and the cat doesn’t move because, from the cat’s perspective, nothing happened, you understand immediately why that matters.
At some point, I started noticing something in executive portrait sessions that I had only previously encountered in shelter work.
The senior partner who sits down in front of the camera with the expression of someone waiting for a moderately unpleasant medical procedure. The real estate agent who has been photographed for fifteen years and has learned, over those fifteen years, to produce a version of her face that reads as friendly without actually being present. The physician who is technically sitting still and technically looking at the camera and is, in every frame, obviously somewhere else.
You might be able to fool some people with that. After enough hours studying faces on a screen, you don’t fool me. And in an era when everyone has been photographed more, through video calls and social media and LinkedIn profiles and every other surface that requires a face, the performance has gotten more practiced. More practiced performance is still performance, and a portrait needs a person, not a performance. That problem has gotten, if anything, harder to solve.
I don’t know exactly when I made the connection between the two. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a gradual recognition, the kind that arrives on the drive home after a session when you realize you’ve been solving the same problem in a different species. The nervous executive is not nervous in the way a frightened dog is nervous. But the underlying fact is similar: they’ve learned to produce a performance of being photographed rather than to actually be photographed.
The tools for addressing it are, I’ve come to understand, essentially the same.
Work slowly, not to seem patient but because working slowly is patience. Move the camera before it’s technically ready, because waiting for perfect stillness transmits your own tension back. Let silence do work. Don’t fill every quiet moment with direction. Ask questions that require actual thought, not the performance of thoughtfulness. Watch for the moment when the person in front of you forgets, briefly, that a camera is present.
That moment exists in most sessions. It doesn’t always arrive. It arrives more often when you’ve built the conditions for it than when you’ve tried to manufacture it by asking someone to relax, which is an instruction no one in the history of photography has ever successfully followed.
People occasionally ask whether I use treats in executive portrait sessions.
No, but the squeaker works great.
This lands differently in different contexts. To someone who doesn’t know the shelter work, it reads as a photographer being glib. To someone who does, it describes something real: the skill set I’ve built over twenty years photographing animals who can’t be coached translates, more directly than I initially expected, to photographing professionals who are performing being comfortable rather than actually being comfortable. The squeaker is shorthand for a longer argument about where the expertise lives and what it was built from. And it’s unexpected. Sometimes unexpected is the right tool in the camera bag.
This is the penultimate issue of what I’ve been calling the AI foundational arc. Over the past several months we’ve covered voice infrastructure, the generic photographer problem, persistent identity, recognizable output. The argument underneath all of it has been that AI tools work differently when there’s something real for them to work from.
What the patience transfer has to do with that is this.
The voice guide doesn’t capture my writing by analyzing my sentence patterns. It captures my writing because I know what I believe about photography and why, and most of that knowing came from mornings at shelters, from sessions that went nowhere useful, from dogs who spent ten minutes watching me before they decided I was worth approaching. The methodology, the voice infrastructure, the project knowledge, the feedback loop, those are a system for preserving something. The something came first.
I’ve been building that something since 2005. Some of it came from the MFA. A different part came from the shelter. And a specific part of it, the part that shows up most clearly in executive portrait sessions, came from the realization that the skills I was building by photographing animals who couldn’t be reasoned with were exactly the skills I needed for photographing professionals who had learned to reason themselves into a performance.
The squeaker is a joke about a real thing.
That’s usually where the useful insights live.