What Wealthy Clients Want From a Photographer

Imagine a family photographer named Marisol Eberly who spent the winter on her camera work. She bought a new lens, took a course on evening light, and rebuilt her editing. Like many photographers, she believes that a wealthy family pays for the best photos in town.

In June, Mrs. Calloway calls about a session at the family’s summer house on the lake. Marisol has an edit due that afternoon, so she gives her usual answer. She describes the hour before sunset, the new lens, and the 75 edited photos in an online gallery. Mrs. Calloway books her for the second week of August.

At the session, Marisol poses the Calloways on the beach the way she poses most families, and the light is perfect. The gallery is the best work she has done. Mrs. Calloway writes that the photos are beautiful, and she downloads a few. She orders nothing for the house. “They’re lovely,” she tells her sister. “They just don’t look like us.” The next summer, she books the photographer her sister used.

Suppose instead that Marisol answers the call with a question. “Before I tell you how I work, what are these photos for?” Mrs. Calloway says that her parents built the house 40 years ago. This is the last summer all three of her children will be home. “We’re not a matching-shirts family,” she says. “The kids are always wet, and my father still takes the boat out every evening.” Her mother wants one photo of all 11 of them on the porch steps.

At the session, Marisol takes the porch photo first, with everyone looking at the camera. Then she follows the family down to the dock. She takes photos of the children jumping in, and of Mrs. Calloway’s father at the wheel as the light goes. Mrs. Calloway hangs the porch photo in the front hall and orders a book of the dock photos for each child. She books Marisol for the next August.

Marisol used the same lens and the same evening light both times. What changed was whose idea of the family the photos showed. In the first version, they showed a handsome family on a beach, which could have been any family Marisol works with. In the second, they showed the Calloways as Mrs. Calloway sees them. The whole family is on her parents’ steps, and the children are wet on the dock.

So a wealthy family is not buying the best camera work. They are buying a record of the family as they believe it is, to keep in the house and hand down. Here is why the camera work does not decide which photographer they hire, and what three photographers found.

A photographer sells a record of the family, not the camera work

A family that can afford any photographer can find sharp focus and good light from several of them. So the camera work rarely decides which one they hire. As with any service, a wealthy client pays for what having your work says about them.

For a family photographer, that is a record of the family as the parents see it. It shows who belongs in the frame, where they are, and what they are like together.

It is natural for a photographer to think that the client pays for the light, the lens, and the edit. Those are the skills that took years to learn. A family looks at the photos for something else. They look for themselves, and for whether the photos show the family they know.

A Naples photographer found wealthy homes with almost no family photos on the walls

Kelly Jones is a family photographer in Naples, Florida. For over a decade, she has been getting her clients’ portraits off their hard drives and onto their walls. The Scout Guide wrote about her after she began designing the walls in clients’ homes after each session.

In those homes, Jones began to notice a pattern. The homes where she designed the largest walls of photos were, in the guide’s words, “mostly barren of family photos.” They were full of art and sculpture, and they looked finished.

“I mostly saw homes without any photos at all,” she said. She also saw empty frames already hung on the wall. She saw canvases and collages that did not suit the room, “all in an attempt to get their photographs up on the wall.”

Her explanation is about memory. “There is a want and a need to surround ourselves with our memories and the emotions they evoke when we look at them,” she said. One December, she ordered dozens of pieces for clients around Naples, many of them from evenings on the beach.

These families could buy any painting they liked, and many had. What their walls lacked was the family itself. That record is what a family photographer sells.

A Hamptons photographer takes the posed photo first, then the photos she sees

Lucille Khornak is a portrait photographer with a gallery in Bridgehampton, New York, and she shoots families across the Hamptons. In 2021, Dan’s Papers asked her whether she prefers posed or candid photos.

“In my paid portraiture work, most clients want a staged posed shot,” she said. “I start with what the parents typically want and then I capture what I see in the session and start capturing energetic, whimsical and soulful images.”

She works at clients’ homes and on the beach. She named the photographer Slim Aarons as a model. “I am also a fan of Slim Aarons who photographed important people in their stately homes and surroundings,” she said. “I enjoy doing the same.”

She also said what the photos are for. A wall of photos of the children “makes them feel important,” she said. The printed books and prints “are what will be passed on from generation to generation.”

The posed photo is how many parents picture their family, so Khornak gives them that first. The rest of the session adds what she sees. Both go into the record, and the record is meant to be handed down.

A wedding photographer called families before the day and learned what mattered to them

Brian Carter is a wedding photographer. In 2024, SLR Lounge asked 17 photographers about the hardest part of how they sell their work. For Carter, it was the phone calls before the wedding. “I used to feel as though I was intruding or taking up too much of my client’s and their family’s time,” he said.

He made the calls anyway, and they turned up what mattered to each family. Some of it was small, such as a client who did not like their own nose. Some of it went deep. Clients said, “I feel like I’m giving away my daughter,” or “we feel like we don’t have an identity as a couple outside of our children.”

Knowing those things, he said, lets him shoot the wedding “knowing rather than hoping I’m capturing everything my clients want.” When he shows the finished photos, his clients are “already emotionally invested” in them. He said that was because of “the value they place on their story being told.”

A portfolio cannot tell a photographer that a parent feels they are giving a daughter away. The family has to say it, and it says it when someone asks. So the asking comes before the session, when it can still change what you shoot.

Why shooting your own idea of the family goes wrong

Imagine a family photographer named Bettina Rhee who has learned to ask before a session. Mrs. Danforth tells her that the family is happiest in the garden, with the dogs and the grandchildren all over the lawn. Mrs. Danforth’s mother, who is 84, says she would like “one proper photo of all of us looking at the camera.”

At the session, the light is going fast, and the children are finally laughing. Bettina says, “Let’s keep going. The natural ones will be better than a lineup.” She shoots the garden until dark.

The gallery is full of grandchildren and dogs, and Mrs. Danforth loves it. She orders a small book. In November, she books a studio for a formal portrait at Thanksgiving, because her mother still does not have her photo.

Bettina’s mistake was deciding that she knew the family better than they did. The posed photo was part of how Mrs. Danforth’s mother sees the family, and Bettina left it out. The version that works takes the lineup first, the way Khornak starts with what the parents want. It takes 10 minutes. Then Bettina follows the grandchildren onto the lawn.

Your camera work still matters

Many photographers have spent years on their camera work. A lesson that says clients buy something else can sound as if those years were wasted.

Khornak traces her eye for detail to the fashion and beauty ads she shot before digital, when retouching was expensive. Jones prints on archival papers guaranteed to last over 200 years. Neither of them sells the craft on its own. The craft is what makes the record good enough to hang beside the art in a client’s house.

So keep working on the craft. For a client who wants to know the job is being done properly, show the craft too.

How to plan a session around the family’s record

Before the session, call the client who booked you, the way Carter calls before a wedding. Open with one question about what the photos are for. For example, a portrait photographer booked for a 50th anniversary can ask, “Where will this portrait hang, and who is it for?”
Build your next questions from the answer, and write down the words the client uses for the family. Say your plan back in those words, not grander ones. For example, a family photographer whose client says “we’re the loud ones” says “loud” back, not “vibrant.”
Ask whether there is one photo the family has always wanted, and plan to take it first. For example, a maternity photographer might hear that the mother wants one photo with her own mother.
Choose the place and the people from what the client told you, not from where your best light is. For example, a fine-art portrait photographer whose client spoke about her late father’s library can shoot her in that room.
Once the photo they asked for is done, shoot what you see in the family. For example, an engagement photographer who heard that the couple met at a running club can follow them on a Saturday run.
Rewrite the first sentence about your work so it describes the record a client keeps. Cross out the lens, the light, and the edit. For example, a family photographer’s “natural-light photography with a fine-art edit” becomes “I take photos of families at the places they go back to every year, for the walls of their own house.”

Next: You will see why an hourly or day rate undercuts a photographer, and how to price the whole engagement instead.