AUBURN — Among the tricks to Rene Roy’s whimsical sleeping baby portraits: Make sure they’re super young and have a waterproof bean bag underneath. To shooting pets: Keep calm, be quick.
To getting out of her own shell: Stop caring what others think, smile.
Roy started her photography business after graduating from college in 1998, shooting a mix of commercial, wedding and portrait work.
She has photographed happy couples. Dozing newborns. College professors. Annual reports.
“What I really like is when I feel like I got ‘that shot,'” Roy said. “I had this one last year, the father was looking at the bride (with) a smile but almost like a sad smile at how beautiful she was, and she was looking ahead at her groom just beaming. It was just this moment.”
When she was young, Roy pictured growing up to be an illustrator. She headed off to the University of Southern Maine to pursue a bachelor of fine arts degree with a concentration in painting.
“I started to be like, ‘Well, am I going to be a famous painter? I’m not really sure about that,'” she said. “I spent a lot of time in the dark room taking photo courses. My photo teacher was really cool and helpful; he was actually a commercial photographer himself.”
She drew inspiration from those classes, starting out as a freelance photo assistant around Portland. She hauled gear, worked with models and learned technical details like setting up strobe lights.
“I worked with a guy a lot who did a lot of stills for Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s, kind of all their hard goods, like shoes and purses and jewelry and men’s ties,” she said. “You learn tricks about how to stuff a boot to look nice and straight and stand up. There’s a lot of armature that goes on in some of this stuff.”
Roy took a class on shooting newborn pictures after discovering it wasn’t as easy as it looks.
“‘That looks really clean and simple, I could do that,’ and then I tried to do a couple and I was like, ‘They’re crying and they’re not sleeping and this isn’t working at all!'” she said. “They need to be 10 days old or less. That’s where I was going wrong, (thinking) ‘Well, I’ll give them time and I’d do it when they are a month old.’ They’re too alert at that point.”
Other secrets: The room needs to be hot. A full belly, or “milk coma,” helps. And then, you wait.
“Those shoots are also about being really calm and really patient because they can definitely sense the feeling in the room,” she said. “It’s definitely the longest type of portrait shoot. Those usually take two to three hours.”
When she shot for a dog catalog, first finding the dog models and then scouting locations, Roy took a similar approach. The mood had to be happy. Someone else would pet, pet, pet the dog to settle it into its pose.
“And then I’m like, click, click, click, click! And then the dog runs away and we do it again,” she said.
In addition to her professional portfolio, Roy, who belongs to YPLAA, the L/A Arts board and the Maine Women’s Network, also posts lots of shots of herself online, mostly silly self-portraits shot by remote trigger while she’s trying to get the lighting for a client’s shoot just right.
“If I’ve got to work, it might as well be fun,” she said. “Photography actually helped me really come out of my shell. I was the art kid, for sure. I realized I needed to be (more outgoing), to direct groups and organize people, especially at weddings. It was a little hard, but you needed to do your job. Eventually you just realize it doesn’t matter; either someone is going to like you or they don’t.”
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