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The people who hate being photographed are not short on confidence, in Andrea de Gabriel’s account. They are short on trust, and trust is the photographer’s job to build.
The client for the 50 Over 50 session arrived worried, as most of them do. Andrea de Gabriel ran through some basic ideas for the shoot, and soon told one of her bad jokes. “I made one of my terrible jokes to break the ice, and to my relief, she laughed, properly laughed,” she says. Within half an hour the client had stopped thinking about the camera. “I remember looking through the viewfinder and thinking, ‘That’s the real person.'”
Andrea de Gabriel is a portrait and personal branding photographer in Cornwall and a 2025 Theo Paphitis #SBS Winner.
Trust Is Built Before the Camera Appears
Andrea De Gabriel has no wish to discuss other photographers’ ethos, and says so, plainly. “I couldn’t, in all fairness, say what other photographers would or wouldn’t do, because every photographer has their own way of working.” The word she does reject is the one almost everyone in the room is using. “I do think people often believe feeling comfortable in front of a camera is about confidence. I don’t. I believe it’s about trust!”
Confidence is something the person either walks in with or does not, which means the photographer has no control over that aspect of the shoot. Trust can be built, and the person who has to build it is the one holding the camera. “My job isn’t to wait for confidence to appear; it’s to create an environment where people feel safe enough to stop worrying.”
“Very few of my clients arrive feeling confident; they’re often worried about how they look, what to do with their hands, or whether they’ll feel and look awkward.” Three separate anxieties, none of them about photography.
“Building trust, understanding what makes someone anxious, and guiding them patiently through the experience is what I focus on.” Every client has a Pre-Session Consultation before the camera is ever raised, and surprises, in her account, are not a hazard of the job but evidence of a badly planned one. “Honestly, there were no surprises; and that’s actually by design. Every client has a pre-session consultation where we talk through expectations, concerns and the entire process before the camera comes out. By the time the shoot starts, there shouldn’t be any unknowns.” After 23 years running her own studio, the knowledge she has gained is not simply about equipment or technique: “creating great portraits is far more about rapport and trust than photography.”
The Career Coach Who Came Back Four Times in Two Years
Liz Bell, a career coach, booked her first professional photoshoot in 2024. She stated her worry was not how the images would look. It was that she did not know how to pose.
Andrea De Gabriel helped to allay her fears. “I reassured Liz that posing wasn’t her responsibility: it was mine.” Then she addressed everything that might cause anxiety, in advance. “Before the session, I sent her my posing guide so she could familiarise herself with some simple techniques, and during the shoot I gently directed her throughout, explaining everything as we went. My aim was to remove the uncertainty so she could simply enjoy the experience.”
“All through the shoot Andrea gently directed me. I was delighted with the final photos,” Liz Bell said. The images went onto her professional profiles and her social posts, where they remain in use.
The evidence that carries more weight than any single sitting is the booking pattern that followed. “I know those images are treasured because they are still an active part of her business and she trusted me enough to return for the 50 Over 50 Amazing Women Project and the subsequent two personal branding shoots she has now had with me: all in all, four photo shoots in less than two years!” A client who had walked in worried about posing had, inside that timeline, made photography a recurring investment in how she runs her business.
What a Business Owner Who Avoids the Camera Can Learn From a Portrait Session
Four lessons come out of the way de Gabriel runs a session, and none of them require a camera. They apply to anyone responsible for working with a reluctant person into a situation where they might feel less than confident:
- First, find the task that might bring greatest anxiety and address it. Liz worried about posing as she never has experienced a photo shoot. Before any session, establish what that person feels most anxious about.It is usually something they never experienced and have no way of learning, alone.
- Second, pre-empty any possible obstacles. The posing guide went out before the shoot, not during it. The standard to run the preparation is that nothing at all is left to be discovered on the day.
- Third, direct continuously, and explain while directing. Andrea De Gabriel’s account of the Liz Bel’sl shoot is constant, gentle instruction with reassurance alongside it. Silence reads as judgment to someone already worried about it. A person who knows what happens next, and why, has nothing left to worry about.
The Sign That the Anxiety Has Gone
- Fourth, trust the tell-tale signs. The tell in that 50 Over 50 session was a laugh, not a posture and not a stated readiness. Posing can be created for an hour.
A reaction nobody planned cannot be.
“Once that happens, the expressions become genuine, the body language relaxes, and the photographs come to reflect the real person in front of me!” Andrea De Gabriel’s advice to the person who has spent years finding reasons not to be photographed is not that they should feel differently about themselves. It is where to put their trust, and in what order: “Trust the experience. Trust me. Most importantly, trust yourself enough to try something different.”
Who Is Andrea de Gabriel, the Photographer Behind the 50 Over 50 Amazing Women Project?
Andrea de Gabriel is a professional portrait and personal branding photographer based in Cornwall, England, photographing clients across Devon, Plymouth and Cornwall, and a 2025 Theo Paphitis #SBS Winner. She has owned and run her studio since June 2003, a 23-year business built on portraiture, personal branding photography and professional headshots for entrepreneurs, business owners and independent professionals.
The specialisation was a decision rather than a drift, and it happened in 2019. “I made the decision to stop photographing weddings, families, babies and children so I could return to my first passion: creating portraits of women,” she says. Personal branding work for women and men followed, combining portraiture with visibility for people running their own businesses. She is direct about the trade-off: “This change didn’t really cost me anything. It gave me clarity. By narrowing my focus, I attracted the kind of clients I most wanted to work with and built a business around work I genuinely love.”
She holds Portrait Masters awards from 2019, 2020 and 2022, presented through the international portrait photography awards associated with Sue Bryce’s education programme. Twenty-five women have, so far, taken part in her 50 Over 50 Amazing Women Project, which photographs women embracing life with confidence rather than fading into the background. She also runs the Brand Refresh Programme, regularly scheduled branding shoots that keep a business supplied with current professional images for its website, social media and marketing, and has since extended her portfolio into Generations sessions for mothers and their children, the and Future Women sessions for young girls to teens, and into couples’ portraits. The additions stay inside the boundary she drew in 2019, “still rooted in creating meaningful portraits rather than trying to be everything to everyone.”
At the heart of her passion is the sentence she hears on the way out, from people who arrived certain they would hate the whole thing: “That was nothing like I expected! I really enjoyed the experience!” None of them walked in with confidence, but hey left with amazing photographs and a renewed sense of confidence.
Andrea de Gabriel is a professional portrait and personal branding photographer based in Cornwall, England, photographing clients across Devon, Plymouth and Cornwall, and a 2025 Theo Paphitis #SBS Winner. To connect with Andrea or learn more, visit https://cornwallportraits.co.uk/or find her on LinkedIn.
