Rangefinder Magazine
August 2005

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Profile: Tim Schooler by LARRY SINGER
Location, Location, Location

What Aristotle said may be true. But, if you happen to be a female high school student living in the heart of Cajun country and you want senior pictures that will make you look more beautiful than you ever imagined, you probably already have an appointment with Louisiana senior portrait wizard Tim Schooler.

Location Techniques
Located in Lafayette, about 50 miles west of Baton Rouge, Schooler, 48, began his involvement with photography before entering his teens.

“I guess I got the bug when I was 10 years old,” Schooler says. “My first camera was a cheap little Polaroid, and from that point on I’d take pictures of anything and everything that moved.”

Years later, it was sports photography that carved the entranceway for Schooler to step into the world of professional photography.

“I have two daughters,” Schooler explains, “and I would follow them around taking action shots as they played soccer. This later turned into a business as I started to get more requests from parents, and eventually other teams, to do action shots and team photos.”

When he became a professional photographer, Schooler followed the time-honored photographic tradition of working out of his home.

“I didn’t have a studio,” he says. “I had portable lights and backgrounds, and I would set up in different locations and shoot. Because of the nature of the beast, I had to develop location techniques.

“Location work is difficult. It’s often hot during senior season. Working in the comfort of a climate-controlled studio is much easier, but I think it also stifles creativity. Something that was a necessity at the time, turned into an opportunity when I realized how much seniors enjoyed shooting on location. Being a senior is a right of passage into adulthood, and it’s one of the most important transitions in their lives.

It’s understandable that they put so much effort into documenting it. They want to have portraits done with their cars, their pets, a dog or a horse, anything that is a part of their lives. I just enjoy being outdoors, and I feel that the soft light of early morning or late afternoon is difficult to recreate in a studio.

“What I do is a blend of traditional portrait lighting and posing, but with more of a fashion edge. It’s something that I think no one in this area was doing at the time I started. The great majority of seniors who come to us will never have a chance to be professional models, but many of them want to be. We give them that chance—we treat them as models for a day. We don’t limit them in clothing changes, and we take them to exciting locations that lend to the fashion style of my work.”

“About 95 percent of my business is seniors,” he says. “We also do a few family portraits, some teams and events like dances, but it’s nearly all seniors, and most of those are girls.”

To get the number of seniors he has drawn as clients, Schooler first played the follow-the-leader card.
“I’ve found the best way to get to kids,” Schooler explains, “is through their friends and word of mouth. If one kid sees that one of their friends or classmates has acquired something they like, they tend to go for it too.

“When I first started, I used kids at local schools as models to help build my new business,” Schooler explains, “and I would give them wallets as samples, which they passed out at school. It’s called the Senior Ambassador program, and I still use it.

“Because word of mouth about me has spread,” Schooler adds, “I don’t do any other advertising. The kids love what I do because they want to be on the railroad tracks, and they want to be shooting downtown, and they want to go take pictures with their pets or cars.

“My specializing in location photography helped create a niche market,” Schooler continues, “because there are a couple of other photographers here in town who do really nice work, but they strictly work indoors. They dislike going on location and they’ll rarely leave their studios.”

Although not having a workplace indoors wasn’t initially an issue for Schooler, having a studio ultimately became a necessity.

“Eventually I realized I needed a studio to do the cap and gown, the drape stuff, and the traditional formal three-quarter length poses,” he says.

“My studio is not very lavish and is only about 1200 square feet. It’s in an office building downtown in Lafayette. Even though it’s not really big, it’s nice. If my business grows as much as it did last spring during my busy season for seniors, there’s no doubt I’ll have to move to a bigger space, and I may even have to take on another photographer.”

No Weddings
After shooting numerous nuptials in addition to his senior portraits, Schooler decided four years ago that weddings were no longer to be on his list of professional services offered.

“One of the main reasons I didn’t enjoy doing weddings,” Schooler explains, “was that I shot medium format, and the equipment was heavy and cumbersome and slow to work with. Digital has changed a lot of that. I did weddings for a few years, and I absolutely love the romance and beauty of the weddings themselves, but I’m a total control freak about everything, and you can’t do that at a wedding. It just has to flow. I still love doing bridal portraits, and I’ve done quite a few of them recently. I just don’t do the actual wedding ceremonies.”

Trade Secrets
When he shoots on location, Schooler does not just judiciously add light to balance the brightness of his subject, he also deftly removes it.

“I never use flash because I can never get it to look the way I want it to look outside,” Schooler says. “It just doesn’t look natural. I don’t like the tiny catch lights from the flash because the catch lights are tiny and the light isn’t as soft. For me, the beautiful speculars in the eyes you get from a big soft box or a reflector outside, just can’t be matched by anything else. I do love the degree of control you can get in the studio with regard to directional lighting, but I had to learn to do this on location, where it is much more difficult.

“I spent a lot of time studying the work of photographers like Leon Kennemer and Dean Collins.

Learning to use subtractive lighting techniques was key to developing the style of lighting that I use today for location portraiture. I took what I learned, and developed my own techniques.

“I have a black collapsing reflector, which I use as a gobo, that I’ll have an assistant hold over my client’s head if I want to take some light away from one side. I’ll then take the reflector, and feather it toward whatever direction the light is coming from, as fill, so I get good modeling on the face.

“I short-light just about everything,” he continues. “One of the things the great master painters, like Rembrandt, realized is that painting a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional medium required the use of shadows to create lighting direction and add depth to their subjects. Photography is as much about shadows as it is about light, and what I’m doing today is just the contemporary version of painting with light.”

Shots From a Canon
Schooler’s cameras of choice are a Canon EOS 1D Mark II and a Canon EOS 20D as a backup. The Canon 135mm f/2 L and the 70–200mm f/2.8 L are his two primary portrait lenses.

Although his knowledge of location lighting could easily fill a textbook, Schooler’s photographic education is entirely self-generated. “I’m a sponge because photography is such a passion for me,” Schooler explains. “My wife can tell you how many hours and hours and hours I’ve spent over the years on the Internet buying photography videos.

“Don Blair was probably one of the biggest influences on my posing style. He was the master of posing the female form, creating and emphasizing ‘S curves.’ I studied much of his work, books, videos, anything I could find. Then over time, I merged his traditional posing style with fashion posing, and applied traditional studio lighting techniques to my location work.

“I go to the seminars the guilds have put on,” Schooler continues, “and I’ve always come away with something. I’m always trying to learn and absorb. I hope I never get to the point where I can’t learn anything because if I do, I’d have to quit. I’m always challenging myself to do better than I did the last time, and when I don’t. I’m very critical of myself, and I beat myself up.”

Fortunately, Schooler is a lot more critical of his work than are his numerous young clients. “My philosophy is to make it fun for them and make them feel special. If I succeed, they’re going to tell their friends to come to me because if they do, they know they won’t just have their pictures taken, they’re going to have a blast.”

When prospective clients visit Schooler’s high-tech interactive web site, they can view dozens of samples of his stunningly beautiful portrait photography, with the accompaniment of the hypnotic rhythms of jungle drums.

Samples of Tim Schooler’s photography can be seen at www.timschooler.com/.

Larry Singer is a writer, photographer and teacher living in Seneca, South Carolina. He can be reached at rangefinderwriter@yahoo.com/.