Excellent Photographers Need Only Apply.

Excellent Photographers Need Only Apply.

Linda Russell is on a mission! After a highly successful and glamorous wedding photography career she has focused her vision on school photography. School photography? Where say “cheese” rules?

"School is a great place to photograph kids, an amazing place. In a very quick moment you can create a quality portrait, build a child’s perception of being photographed, please a parent AND make money. Serious money." The school photography industry is the largest segment of the professional photography industry, a 1.5 BILLION dollar industry and Linda believes it is high time the professional portrait photography community became more active in this industry.

"For the last 14 years I have been an “in the closet” school photographer. While my fine art portrait business and weddings grew in notoriety I was sneaking out each fall tossing on my Mugshots’ World Peace t-shirt and photographing thousands of local children."

The results are amazing!

"Mugshots is a proofing program form of photography; I don’t make money if the parents don’t buy. This keeps a photographer honest. If I don’t create a compelling product parents won’t purchase, the risk is on the photographer, but do a good job and the financial rewards are there."

"The way I look at it is that parents utilize their combined buying power to purchase a smaller portion of my very expensive eye."

"Heck, I see school photo orders on a regular basis in excess of a $100, sometimes as much as 300-A pretty good return on a minute and a half of my focus."

But how does this affect my more expensive portrait business?

"When I was asked to photograph my first school I was very worried that photographing a school would sully my reputation as a high-end portrait photographer. Here I was photographing the wealthy and renowned Bay Area family’s portraits and million dollar weddings and now I was going to do $18 photo packages? But I am compulsively creative and with 2 small children to support I was of the mind to say yes to business. So I named the company after one of my published greeting card images of 2 children with their faces covered by mugs-“Mugshots” I had no idea at the time that the school photography industry called headshots-Mugshots- another little bit of serendipity."

"Mugshot’s ended up being a boom for my family portrait business. It seems that families recognize good photography wherever they find it and understand that a private session is more valuable than a school session. With the mailing address of every student I photographed I could easily market my portrait work as well. Just going to the grocery store would yield jobs when a child riding in the cart exclaimed “I know you, you took my picture at school,” next thing I knew the parent was asking me if I did family portraits. Plus the look of my portrait work complements Mugshots not competes with it."

How do you get the jobs?

"In its humble beginnings Mugshots was almost entirely a parent movement. I did very little marketing for schools. All of my advertising dollars went into promoting wedding and portrait photography. Then as parents began requesting us in the public schools, the I became a we, and we had to begin really putting together a presentation program, marketing materials and more dynamic web presence. In order to compete with the “National Company” we could no longer appear as “just” a homegrown local. In general, schools hate change. If they have been using the “National Company” they want to keep using it, even if they hate the photos and loathe picture day because they feel safe. I knew we were on to something when the administrators could no longer ignore the parent’s demands for a better school photography product. What they also found was that Mugshots made school photography easier on them. We had developed innovative ways to lessen the impact of school photography on the academic day. We have had school secretaries hug us with glee at the end of the day."

What does it take to photograph schools?

"Besides an excellent eye, sense of timing, and the water retention of a camel, you need systems. Over the years the photography has never faltered but the backend production has. Matching name and image data, ordering information, where and when deadlines required military precision. We shopped numerous software options over the years but all of them were directed toward the standard school photography system of one subject, one shot, prepaid, add to that the fact that we were a Mac based studio we couldn’t find anything that worked. So my career as software developer began and we created a wonderful studio software solution that keeps track of all the details and deadlines we need to easily stay on top of the demands of volume photography."


"2004 was our first year of online ordering, which while promising, was not without a number of challenges. As if being a photographer, software developer, marketing, and sales diva was not enough I was managing an online store. Then my some miracle of networking I ran into Simplephoto. Across the country on another coast was another photographer envisioning the same thing. School photography easily viewed and ordered on the web. Unlike wedding photography, where my experience of the printing reordering bonanza never panned out-they simply looked without purchasing-parents loved being able to buy online. It was fast, convenient and less deadline driven. They were delighted to have their photos delivered directly to their home. With Mugshot’s creative product-lines (we believe in gimmick free photo products…what parent wants their child’s face sitting on the back of a giraffe?) and Simplephoto’s hosting we are now seeing a $69 average on high school UNDERCLASS orders and a $79 on elementary school students. We still provide parents with the traditional order envelope but we hope, along with the school administrators, to eventually see the schools out of the ordering and delivery business."

Mugshots in the future

"There is something to be said for experience and I have had a lot of it both successful and not so successful and my present mission is to empower portrait photographers to change the world of school photography. Mugshots is presently in it’s infancy in vision, my team of creatives are constantly coming up with more and more ideas on how the industry can become a localized force of change. To do that we need to photograph more students and rather than train a legion of temporary freelancers we want to provide community based photographers with the tools and network necessary to succeed. “ We have a slogan at Mugshots, “Cheese is a dairy product, not an expression” if you understand what that means and if you are an excellent portrait photographer, by all means send us your contact info and let’s change the world together, one smile at a time."