When Shooting becomes overwhelming

Ever notice how often life gets overwhelming. I would like to give you a quick example of what a week for me looked like this past summer. I don't do this to complain, actually the opposite is true, we all get busy but when you are doing something you love it just doesn't seem that bad. So sit back read about a week in late August and next week we will get back to our tutorial on using your camera in manual.

DAY 1

 It started on a Thursday when just after 10 AM my cell phoned chirped an appointment alert. Now I wasn't that stressed about it cause anything important I give myself a 24 hour and 1 hour alert, so imagine my surprise when I checked it and discovered I had to be on location for a filming shoot for a pilot local cable TV show. No camera equipment in my vehicle I had to race home load up and head to the location arriving a mere 10 minutes late, which I blamed on traffic. We filmed all day and then I took my wife to YUK YUKS comedy club that evening for an entertaining time with friends.

 Day starts at 7:00 AM ends 2:00 AM

DAY 2

Now my day did start a little slower as I didn't have to do anything till 10 AM so slept in till 9. Then it's time to hit the computer and start work on the film that was shot Thursday.

At about noon I decided, all beit late and not smart, that the volunteer t shirt I would be wearing on Sunday shooting Chilliwacks Flight Fest should have my LOGO on it. Now if you have read earlier posts you may have seen the one about LOGOs and how important I think they are, well I also said that you should have professionals do that work and shirt logos are no different. I did not follow my own advise and due to the lateness of the hour I decided to go with an iron on printed at home. I couldn't find any iron ons in clear only white so the shirt did not turn out as nice as I had hoped but I learned from this mistake and will change things in the future.

That night I had the opportunity to shoot KAT at Party in the Park, a local Chilliwack festival. Now this girl is amazing. I have shot her in the past and love being involved in her career. She won EMI & MOA record recording contract 2012. She has been featured on Jan Arden's Being Jan  and continues writing and recording her own flavor of music. Look her up on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube. I was home about 9 and had to work the photos for her social sites that night. Post production done at 2 AM sent via WeTransfer to her manager. Off to bed.

 Day starts 9:00AM ends 2:30AM

Day 3

Preparation for Friday nights Hangar dance shoot and following airshow shoot. Now if you've never been to the Chilliwack Flight-fest hangar dance and dinner you are missing something amazing. The food is incredible with a full steak dinner with baked potato and Chilliwack grown corn on the cob. After the dinner there is an evening mini performance by some of the performers flying the next day. Shoot into the evening, have a few beverages, home late , do post on photos that are needed for the next day bed.

 Day starts 8:00 Am ends 2:00AM

Day 4

Start the day shooting the Flight-fest volunteers setting up for the day. A pancake breakfast for the community and then on with the show. Now this is my second year covering the event and it is a true honor to be the exclusive photographer for the event. Between B25 Mitchel bomber, spitfire, wing walker and stunt planes this was a photographers dream. The weather was amazing and the photo ops even more so.

Day starts at 6:30 AM ends 10:00pm

Now comes all the editing and when you shoot that many venues in that short a period of time it is very critical to get the best from your manual settings as you can so there is very little editing to be done. By Thursday, and after working at my other full time job 36 hours, my editing is done and all photos are in the hands of the clients. They are happy. I am happy. Now onto a new photographic day.

Giving control to the clients: the editing process

You've been approached by a client. You've met with and hashed out the details of a shoot. You've shot amazing photos of the subject and now it's time to do some editing and wrestle with the age old question: what to keep, and what to discard?

In this new age of digital photography, there are some who firmly believe in setting the camera on auto  and firing away, relying on the law of averages to get some good shots.

But you call yourself a photographer, and when you're charging a client for your skills there'd better be more to it then that.

The last shoot I did was a family of three: mom, dad, and baby girl. In all honesty, there is no real way to screw that up. They were an extremely photogenic family, and they chose their nicely manicured backyard as the shoot location. I shot for about an hour, and ended with just under a hundred shots.

Then the real work starts: I returned home to do my editing.

First of all, I deleted any photos that were grossly out of focus, which brought me down about eighty shots. Not bad. After going through the remaining photos, I found myself with about thirty-five photos that I believe delivered the wow factor I'm looking for. Burn to disk. Deliver to client. Done!

Or so I thought.

During the shoot and just after, I showed a few of the shots to the clients on the camera LCD, just to give them a small taste and make sure I was still capturing in the style that they wanted. This is something I always do in shoots; clients are usually a bit apprehensive, and nobody is going to be as picky about their appearance as they are, so giving them a little taste is not a bad thing.

But with this particular shoot, my clients took that little taste a bit further. They remembered some of the shots I had shown them, which I was not happy enough with to include on the disk, and asked after them.

So we went through the rest of the photos together, I was stunned when they specifically requested copies of another twenty shots or so. Especially when dealing with a nine-month-old baby, there's always an element of surprise with candid shooting, and you can end up with some (shall we say) "unusual" facial expressions. These were shots that I took out, but when we went over the photos a second time, the parents thought that these expressions were natural and adorable. Even if they were kind of funny, they were shots the parents wanted to keep.

I've already talked about how it's important to keep your client in the loop when choosing the circumstances of a photo shoot, and this just goes to show how important it is to have the client's feedback. In the future, I'll try to include the client in the editing process as well. It's still important to go through and cut out any blurry or out-of-focus shots first, but when it comes to subject matter, who is the photographer to judge? Again, it's important to remember the client knows what they like; you only think you do.

Remember, as always, the client needs to be in charge -- especially with candid photography. This can be a hard place to work from, but clients are starting to look for an "interactive" experience with a photographer, instead of the traditional studio shoot. All too often you'll be the only one interacting with your photographs, and you won't always have the opportunity to ask your subject what they think of the final piece. When you can ask a second opinion, do so. Involving the client will end in a more relaxed atmosphere, better photographs and a completely customized experience for your client.