2025 03 24

Mal, from a Keep it 100 session at See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Becoming a Portrait Studio
by Clayton Hauck

The following thoughts were written in conjunction with an event happening later this week. Keeping The Lights On: An evening with photographers Clayton Hauck and Jason Little. They will discuss the importance of creative exploration within personal work and projects. You can rsvp for that event here.

Becoming a studio portrait photographer has been a humbling process and far more challenging than I anticipated. While, yes, I’ve been a professional photographer for two decades now, I’ve actively avoided pursuing portrait or headshot clients. Previously, I didn’t have the studio space and for that reason alone it never made much sense. Dedicated space aside, the economics of portrait photography is challenging, especially in today’s market, where everyone is either a photographer themselves or knows a skilled photographer. 

All this said, I became obsessed with a setup artist Jeremy Cowart was offering and sharing via his Instagram. He now calls it The Portrait Lab and has built an entire business around the concept in his hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, outside of Nashville. The methods that caught my attention were his use of a projector to change the background throughout the shoot (he’s now using a fancy LED wall), along with varied lighting schemes which cycle through as you shoot. Basically, I loved the idea of creating a more organic and random situation inside of a controlled studio setting. It would blend a bit of my own candid photographic style into a more traditional portrait approach and I had to try it for myself.

Days of internet sleuthing and rabbit holes eventually led me to the setup I now use (though I prioritize tweaks and trying new things each time I set it up). Jeremy is quite open about his process and has laid much of it out in various industry talks you can find online. For me, the biggest hurdle was not figuring out how to technically do it, but the decision to blatantly steal the idea of another artist. It’s one I still struggle with, while doing everything I can to make the setup my own in the process. For example, he embraced Ai while I shunned it and made Anti-Artificial Intelligence the core focal point of my process.

The name “Keep it 100” came to me while editing photos late one night in the studio. Chicago’s now mayor Brandon Johnson was doing a campaign event, dropped the line in conversation, and it just sort of clicked. I could offer people one-hundred unique photos for one-hundred dollars in one-hundred seconds, all while shunning Ai and providing people with real-life images in a style that is hard to believe isn’t artificial. It would showcase the power that photography can still wield in a world where technological advancements are eroding our standards towards what we believe is real.

THE NEXT BIG THING IN PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY

The first few test shoots I did were so fun that I was completely convinced this thing was going to be huge. In my head, I was envisioning renting spaces to open additional studios while completely customizing the experience to whatever the subjects wanted. Different colors, backdrops, lighting vibes, propping, wardrobe, etc. It would be like a professional wedding photo booth on steroids and there would be lines out the door, I thought! This thing was going to be so big I could pivot my career and open up locations offering these quick and exciting portrait sessions all over the country! Like a photo-obsessed Ray Krok, I was already perfecting the operational flow as guests moved through the setup. 

Then I started offering sessions — for free — to my friends and Instagram followers. That’s when the challenging reality of the situation began to set in. While I’d been thinking this thing would quite literally sell itself and get instantly booked solid whenever I made openings available, the exact opposite thing happened. Nobody cared. It was hard to get people to come by and park themselves in front of my camera, even for the low price of freeeeee! 

Quickly, I learned that convincing people to come to you and give you any amount of money is no easy task, even when you’re offering what you consider to be the world’s best portrait deal. Communicating your ideas are even more important than executing them. That was the takeaway, and it was demoralizing and almost made me give up; it’s what I’m still working on well over a year later.

SALES > SKILLS 

This is the grim reality that artists like myself never want to believe is true. We like to think that good work will rise to the top and get an audience naturally. That people will come flocking to us for our skills alone. That if we only buckle down and focus on producing the best work, everything else will fall into place naturally. At the same time, we love to complain about how so-and-so is terrible and it’s dumbfounding that they got signed by a rep and are working on huge productions all of the time. We focus on the negatives and make excuses that don’t help us in any way. I’m amazed by how often I catch myself remembering that not everyone else already knows and thinks the same things I do.

The portrait setup, for me, was a great refresher in starting out as a photographer — this shit is hard! 

While things started very slow, they did eventually pick up, hardly thanks to my own doing. I stumbled along, offering portrait openings every few months as my schedule allowed, but bookings were light even at my $100 price point. Fortunately, my studio has also allowed me to expand my social network as I’m meeting lots of people through the various events that we host. This is when I learned the value of influencers (another thing we photographers love to scoff at!).

Dennis Lee is a super talented guy (you can find him at Food is Stupid and The Party Cut). He booked a $100 session and loved the results so much that he wrote about it on his popular newsletter, while also telling me I was insane for making it so cheap, which helped me to raise my prices. This was just the bump I needed. Both a social proof-of-concept and a shot of much-needed confidence for myself, the next session found itself a ton more bookings, largely thanks to Dennis, and also because I’d kept at it through the awkward period when things weren’t working out as I thought they were going to.

After the Influencer Bump, I embraced the word-of-mouth method and began to focus on shaping an email list to help promote the offering (something I should have been doing from day one). I woke up one Monday last fall and decided to drop another run of dates the following week. Within hours, I had a dozen bookings already lined up. This was the moment I realized I was on to something with some real potential.

LETS TALK NUMBERS

Earlier I mentioned stealing Jeremy’s idea as being difficult for me. It still is. Another challenge is the super low price point. As a commercial photographer, I’m used to being “too expensive” for clients on a regular basis. We have high standards and we are pretty tough about sticking to them, so me coming out and offering dirt cheap portrait sessions both goes against my own standards and does a disservice to other portrait photographers who make a living doing this work, which is another thing I’m very sensitive to.

So why do I do it?

This answer is complicated and, admittedly, still evolving. My immediate response is that it’s a tough market and the only easy way to get regular bookings is to offer a deal so good that people can’t resist. But this doesn’t justify undercutting your colleagues. My current working justification is that this is a trade. While, yes, I’m giving people wildly affordable portraits (my pricing has since risen to $150, with various add-ons also available to help make it more lucrative for me), I’m also doing it on my own terms. In a sense, these cheap sessions are paid test shoots for me. I’m using whatever backgrounds and lighting schemes I want to try out and learn from, while keeping each session very short (ten minutes or less, usually) so that I can squeeze in a bunch each day. This helps make the math work better without compromising the results — people are still getting an incredible value and the low price point makes me feel good, in a way, that I am providing a “high end” service for an accessible fee. It’s important to me that I’m able to cater towards faces and personalities that otherwise would not show up if I was charging, say, $600 a session (a price that is far more representative of my time and the equipment involved in making all of this happen).

All that said, when my agent tells me I “look desperate” and am ruining my reputation, I don’t fully disagree with her. This industry runs on perception, and the guy doing cheap headshots, or shooting weddings, or events, can’t be trusted to handle a McDonald’s production the following week. Love it or not, that’s how things work. 

Her solution is for me to raise my prices significantly. My solution is to drop them and make the whole thing an art project. My end goal is to make Keep it 100 run as a project that primarily raises money for charity, while working with sponsors and finding other creative solutions to fund it and make money for myself. While the vision is still formulating in my brain (and is very much inspired by another friend and Keep it 100 backer, John Carruthers), and I have a lot of work left to do, it’s this goal which is driving me forward and keeping me most excited about the project.

IN CONCLUSION

Trust me, I hate talking about this stuff. I’d much rather be at the studio shooting new sessions right now and letting things play out organically. But I’m also learning that it’s important, both for marketing purposes (yuck) and my own sanity, to dedicate time towards processing everything and talking about it. Without stopping to digest what you are doing and why it is either working or not working, you risk driving yourself mad in the process or missing potentially simple solutions which allow your idea the space it needs to grow into what you know it has the potential to be.

I’m excited to share the next phase of this endevour, which is largely me getting back to my roots, in the coming days.

-Clayton

Thanks for reading and if you want to hear more about this, the next phase of Keep it 100, and various other personal projects I’ve been working on, stop by my studio this Thursday for the APA Chicago event. Click here to book a session or sign up for the Keep it 100 email alert list and get some fun new photos of your own!

2025 03 23

Jack and I enjoyed one too many adult beverages. Chicago, Illinois. February, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Jack and I might be cooking something new up. This year is shaping up to be a transformative one for me in many ways. More soon.

Also, Jack has a new photobook out that is great and you should check it out and buy a copy. We might be able to help you with that soon.

-Clayton

2025 03 22

Armitage Avenue, in need of some new shops. Chicago, Illinois. February, 2025 © Clayton Hauck

Why I’m such a sucker for tiny shops like this one, I don’t fully understand. But this lil spot is so cute that I’ve been dreaming of putting a business inside of it for more years than I can remember. One day, perhaps.

-Clayton

2025 03 21

Good Boy wants to go outside. EZ Inn, Chicago, Illinois. February, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Open yourself up to chance.

Today I walked to work, as I usually do, and I took a different path than usual, as I always try but usually fail to do. As a reward, I ran into a friend and got to hear about her trip to Europe. I then encountered some animals and made a few photos of scenes I encountered.

Then, as I ate my lunch at the studio, this Alec Soth video (below) played.

Open yourself up to chance as often as you can and rewards will follow.

-Clayton

2025 03 20

Cone in snow. Chicago, Illinois. February, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Please pardon the dust as I spend my time building yet another new website and prep for a photo talk going down next Thursday, in which I will debut said website.

-Clayton

2025 03 19

Beer. Chicago, Illinois. June, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Got some shit news today. Imagine taking a test that your life literally depended on. I realize I’m being vague but can’t really get into it more than that (I’m fine).

I’m reminded of that famous joke from The Simpsons. "Beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

Stay safe and stay healthy, y’all.

-Clayton

2025 03 18

Doggie Day Care. Baltimore, Maryland. September, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Apologies for the lack of content lately, I’ve been busy starting a new business.

-Clayton

2025 03 17

Somewhere in northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Back from a gig down in St Louis and a few days of Ill Wandering (lots of time on the road — need to prioritize less driving next time) and I’m catching up on life, getting back into the routine of things. This week, I aim to make my new website go live. More on that soon. I’m also preparing for a talk going down in two weeks time in which myself and fellow photographer/friend Jason Little will discuss how we use personal work in our practice. I feel like lately all I do is personal work, so I should have much to discuss. I’ll aim to make it worthwhile for both those in attendance and myself.

-Clayton

PS - on the topic of photography, this video by Noah Kalina hit my feed today and I really enjoyed it. Give it a watch, if interested.

2025 03 16

Farm outside Ashkum, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

When I began my Illinois Project (photographing the state outside of Chicago), I was smitten by scenes like this. I still find this image beautiful, but a year later, I now realize a big part of what drew me towards these images was my lack of prior experience with them. Now that I have folders full of them, the charm sort of wears off a bit and you start to understand nobody has the patience to look at more than one of these photos, if even that. Maybe I’m wrong?

I’ve continued making these photos and will revisit them in time. Peeking back at this image now, made roughly a year ago, gives me the thought that maybe there is more charm in the simplicity than I’d previously thought.

One other result from my recent foray into capturing rural Illinois is that I now completely love bare trees, where previously my brain would almost totally ignore them. Nature’s fireworks, I like to think. Only they happen at such a slow pace that most humans will never comprehend their beauty.

-Clayton

2025 03 15

Freight train rolls through Ashkum, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

One thing that draws me to rural Illinois is the trains. I dream of living the life of a hobo and creating a large body of work from that perspective, but know I don’t have it in me to do so. The idea of living a far less comfortable lifestyle in pursuit of art is one that fascinates me, but I’ve grown too reliant on air conditioning and Amazon next day delivery.

Also, I need to photograph things out of focus more often…

-Clayton

2025 03 14

Pizza Palace. Ashkum, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This photo is a visual representation of the Midwesterner’s saying “I’m living the dream.”

-Clayton

2025 03 13

North of Champaign, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

The big takeaway I had last year after my various Illinois Wandering sessions (which were admittedly not very focused and more of an afterthought) was that, while I was making some okay photos of cool scenes, none of the images really stood out as being strong enough to stand on their own. Sure, this image is beautiful (imo) and might work well in a series with other images providing meaning and backstory, but I’d been hoping to make work that would really stand out and be something I would be proud to show others. In reality, I was getting images that felt too pulled back and observational, like a tourist making snaps on the family vacation. I needed to be a part of the action. The images need to feel purposeful, powerful, and spark emotion. This shot is on the right track; it was made as a storm rolled over the plains, powerful to experience firsthand while being there in person, but a subject (a person, ideally) could’ve made it really stand on its own two feet as a strong image.

That’s the trouble with wandering around a rural state alone in your car — the amount of humans you encounter is remarkably small. I continually think of two possible solutions as I’m out on my own: The Crewdson Approach or the Soth Approach.

The obvious solution for a commercial photographer like myself, if wanting to make the strongest images possible, is to produce them like Crewdson does! Put a bunch of money into solving the problem. Get a van, fill it with people and props and a pre-planned road map and go make it happen. The challenge with this approach is that it’s not what drove me to explore my state in the first place. The resulting images may be “better” but any of the meaning I hope to create will be lost.

While it’s ultimately a far more challenging and time consuming approach, the honest, photojournalistic mentality is what’s been driving me to do this. I continually get the feeling while out exploring that I am in a place forgotten by the rest of the world, its time long passed. It’s wanting to document that feeling and emotion for a future audience that drives me to push through and continue exploring this approach to the work, while knowing full-well the strength of the images might suffer and the fine art galleries of New York City may never call.

My cast of characters should be the people who live and work in these places that I encounter, who understand and are at home in them. Pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone in order to access these photographic opportunities is the part that will be most challenging, but I am taking steps in that direction and so far it feels good.

-Clayton

2025 03 12

Somewhere in northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Everyone likes looking at photos of rural farmland, right??? Right?!

-Clayton

2025 03 11

Somewhere in Northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Catching up on posts as I’ve been on the road and didn’t have time to make them as I was busy shooting and wandering. It’s interesting looking back at these images from last March as I’ve made quite a lot of progress and changes to how I want to approach this project moving forward. More on that later!

-Clayton

2025 03 10

Somewhere in northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This week I’ll be doing some Ill Wandering while traveling to and from an assignment down in St Louis. I don’t have much planned out, but am excited to explore and document regions further south in the state. In additional to making photos, the goal is to also do some video and short interviews with strangers as well. This is part of yet another project I am working on, which I will talk more about soon.

-Clayton

2025 03 09

Sunset on Bloomington. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Chicago’s weather today was glorious. The first nice weekend day where everyone leaves the house and it makes the city feel alive with energy and humanity. It’s days like these that make me glad to live where I do.

-Clayton

2025 03 08

(Hidden) Busted Car. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

While out celebrating my birthday yesterday, I realized that my driver’s license had expired that day. Needing to drive to St Louis for a photo assignment in a few days, I was worried that getting this renewed in time would not be possible (also considering the state had determined I needed to pass a written test to do so). Fortunately, I spent Saturday afternoon at the DMV and made it happen after an hour or so of sitting in the waiting room listening to numbers being called.

Afterwards, we celebrated with pizza at Barnaby’s up in Northbrook, which has been on our list of spots to check out. The pizza was great and the place was wildly crowded with families enjoying an early Saturday night pizza dinner. As we ate, numbers were called out continuously as orders were ready, which made the whole experience feel appropriate post DMV.

-Clayton

2025 03 07

Me, ill wandering. Somewhere in Illinois. December, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

It is my birthday.

-Clayton

2025 03 06

John aka Crust Fund making another pizza during a fundraiser event at my See You Soon space. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I’m wildly proud of the things I’ve been able to do at my studio space. That said, I often forget all of the things that have happened here. It’s easy to look at an empty calendar and get sad about how slow or hard things are. Two thoughts on this:

1. Having just completed my taxes (I secretly like doing them because it’s a nice reminder of all the things you did the previous year), I was left impressed by how busy the studio kept me in a year that I’d kind of summed up as being a bad year (business-wise).

2. I’m (forcing myself to) finally get a regular newsletter going. We’ll start with the studio, which should go out every month, and eventually (soon) I’ll get one going for my own “personal brand” which will be focused solely on my photography work. I’ve long shunned this habit because: it’s boring and I don’t want to do it; they just get trashed and hardly anyone sees them; I dislike talking about myself (contrary to what this blog may lead you to believe!). That said, it finally hit me that there’s just as much benefit to my own personal mental health in the practice as there is potential benefits from a marketing perspective, and that’s huge!

Set aside some time to look back and reflect on all the amazing things you’ve accomplished and it will likely help bring a smile to your face.

Then, if you don’t tell anyone about all the cool things you’ve done, did they actually happen?

-Clayton

PS- sign up for the newsletter why don’t you?!

2025 03 05

Sunset in Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois. December, 2024. © Clayton Hauck