When portraitist Melissa White says “the beach” is 20 minutes from her San Luis Obispo, California, home, she means a half dozen different beaches. The Pacific Ocean laps at a wide swath of sand at one beach and crashes into rock outcroppings below mighty cliffs at another. Scenery includes palm trees, surfboards, a lifeguard tower, and a pier. Also 20 minutes from White’s house are settings such as fields of flowers, lush green hills, stands of conifers and oaks, and the Oceano Dunes. This array of ecosystems comprises the backdrops of her senior portraits.
“Every time I’ve gone to a conference, I get that question a lot: ‘How do you have so much variety in your backdrops?’” White says over video chat from her home office. “It’s just because I live in a fantastic, amazing, wonderful, diverse place.” And yet, she says, a dumpster is the backdrop for one of her favorite senior portraits. While doing a session in an alley near a beach, White recalls, she spotted the bright blue object and, noting her client’s blue eyes and blue shoes, posed the young woman in front of it. “She is sitting in front of a dumpster!” White says with emphasis, “and we made it look amazing.”
“I GET TO HELP PEOPLE FEEL BEAUTIFUL”
White grew her 16-year-old business through sheer will and study, adopting keen marketing skills while thriving on word-of-mouth referrals. She developed her signature style of bright, airy images while using just one Nikon camera and one lens, with no added lighting or filters. Still, she hesitated to call herself a professional photographer. “It probably wasn’t until four or five years ago that I felt confident in saying I was a professional photographer,” she says. “Ask me what I did, I’d say, ‘Oh, I take pictures.’ I still don’t feel like it’s my identity. I would much prefer saying I get to help people feel beautiful.”
One way White accomplishes this is by employing professional hair and makeup artists for clients, both to create a memorable experience and also to get the most polished portrait look. San Luis Obispo—known as SLO in local vernacular—is “super laid back, super casual, super real,” White says, which means many high schoolers don’t wear makeup or focus much on fashion. The professional glamour staff sometimes must explain how the “stage makeup” they use might seem excessive in the mirror but looks natural through the camera lens.
It was a makeup artist who inspired White’s senior portrait business. In one of the few weddings White photographed, the bride’s sister was the hair and makeup stylist. She and White enjoyed working together so much that the stylist suggested they team up to do senior portraits. While White worried about the time investment, meeting a new class of clients every year appealed to her. Their first year, 2012, they had 17 clients. The next year, recalls White, they had 75. The two worked together for five more years before parting amicably, and now White has three stylists who work with her.
FROM HOBBY TO SELL-OUT SESSIONS
On the About page on White’s website, “photographer” comes third after she identifies herself as “wife” and “mom” to four children, today all teenagers. Her Nikon Z 7 and 50mm lens is ninth on her list of favorite things, while “gorgeous light,” the fundamental essence of her portraits, is No. 14. Other favorites include family (first), faith, “friends like family,” peonies, her iMac and traveling. An Oregon native, White moved to SLO to attend California Polytechnic State University and earned a degree in nutrition. She met her future husband at Cal Poly, and after they bought a house and her nutrition career hit a dead end, she settled into family life while her husband embarked on a banking career. White began blogging about her children using her own photographs of them. Her readers, she says, started asking White to photograph their kids. “It was just a little hobby,” she says, but the hourlong sessions and “painstakingly editing hundreds of photos” interfered with her family time, so her husband urged her to consider charging a fee. “I had a really hard time putting monetary value on my time,” she says, before realizing, “If I was saying yes to a client, I was saying no to my family. I priced myself appropriately because I saw the value in my kids’ time.”
Doing 75 senior portraits that year was a challenge, especially since her four children were ages 6 months to 6 years old. She established a family schedule that includes 30 days for senior portraits. “I have a hard time saying no,” White says, adding that she usually ends up with more than 50 sessions per year. She estimates her conversion rate, from initial inquiries to bookings, is about 80 percent. Those 30 days, which fall between June and November, sell out in 12 hours, White says. She then creates a waitlist: this year’s has 45 people on it, 40 of whom she knows.
As much as she would like to, she says, “I don’t know if I can come up with 45 spots on the calendar” to accommodate them. “It just gets crazy.”
White says her fees are higher than most of her local competitors, and she raised the prices for each of her packages by $100 last year because of inflation, her first price increase in 10 years. Though demand suggests she could charge more and work less, she resists. The seniors she’s photographing have been her children’s classmates since kindergarten, she explains, so “it’s hard for me to raise my prices on them.”
GLAM SESSIONS
Self-taught as a photographer, White attends conferences to learn additional skills. She offers five different packages, including a three-hour Dream Session with multiple outfit changes and photographing in several locations, and a 10-minute Yearbook Mini Session. She also offers an add-on package for friends to be photographed together. Her most popular package is 90 minutes, five outfits, and two locations, known as the Glam Session. “It’s the one I want to do the most,” White says, so she started advertising it as the most popular package. Today, White says the Glam Sessions account for 75% of her bookings.
Time is her most valuable commodity, which makes SLO an ideal locale. All the best settings are about 20 minutes from each other, and she takes note of potential backdrops on her day-to-day errands. “I always have a couple of options in my back pocket,” she says. She gets a head start with beaches by monitoring their conditions on an app. She makes unplanned stops when the lighting or a backdrop catches her fancy. She travels light, carrying only her camera, a camping shower tent for wardrobe changes, and a reflector “just in case,” though she says she has never used it. White always chooses light over location, she says, because more important than the setting is capturing the inner glow of her young clients on the cusp of their futures. In fact, White says her “favorite compliment ever” came from parents who claim she “caught the essence, the spark we see” of their child.
White likes incorporating movement into her images. “Anyone can be perfectly posed and have every hair in place, but I like more movement and imperfection and uniqueness,” she says. She can draw that out of her subjects using one of her greatest tools: her enthusiasm. “Energy is contagious. If you’re excited about the flowers on the side of the road, your client is going to be excited, too,” she says. “Being a photographer, you’re in the customer-service business. To get good images, you have to be able to connect on a very real level. Part of the reason I’ve been successful is I connect. I put my real self out there and give them permission to be their real selves.”
Eric Minton is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
