Happy New Year!

For some the new year will be "just a zero becoming a one" and to others it will have much greater meaning. I lie somewhere in between. The rolling of the digits is not a big deal to me but I do view it as a time to do a bit of an audit in one's life and see what can be adjusted to make improvements. Since this is a photography themed blog I am going to keep my "improvements" relevant and I am not going to call them "resolutions" but rather "intentions". Calling them "resolutions" seems like I am just dooming them to failure right from the get go.

Throughout January I will post a bunch of personal intentions for my photography throughout this shiny new year and hopefully beyond. So, here we go, intention number one.


Slow down, take more time and be patient during a shoot

Pretty straight forward and pretty simple but I have a tough time following through, especially when time is constrained. Let me give an example.

My last major shoot of 2010 was a stock session with a friend. The space we were using for the shoot wasn't my usual space but I had been in the room before so at the very least I knew it was large enough to accommodate our needs. Normally I get to the space ahead of the client and set up as to not keep the client waiting but in this case my model was the one who had the key to the studio. I arrive a tad late, unpack a ton of gear and begin setting up. It takes about 30-40 minutes before I am taking my first test shots. About half an hour in to the shoot my friend informs me that due to an unexpected circumstance she has to leave a bit earlier than we planned. Yikes! So now my time is constrained so I just keep moving through poses and snapping away - no time for breaks! I do not want to waste any precious shooting time by pulling off some images and reviewing them on the laptop, instead I just glance at the images from time to time on the camera's LCD. Yikes, yikes! Now, as an aside, can anyone actually review an image on a tiny LCD and know, for certain, that they got the shot? I certainly can't! I can tell that my exposure is pretty good and I can tell that I have reasonable sharpness and colour but beyond that I need to bring the images up on a larger monitor to know if I really did get the shot.

The session wraps up and I head home and review the images from the shoot. Overall they look okay but there are two distinct issues. One, there seems to be a yellow colour cast on the right side of the frame and two, the images are sharp but not tack sharp. Both problems would have been easy to fix *if* I had of caught them during the shoot but because I just kept pressing on a small issue became becomes a much bigger one in post.

So, I need to allocate just a bit of time during my shoots to do some quick image reviews to make sure that I am truly on the right track. Easy peasy.

Keep shooting.