San Jose Followup

I’m back in the office today to begin the arduous task of making my selects from my San Jose photoshoot. I’ld love to post some of the photos from the shoot,but seeing as they are company people rather than models and their release forms only give my company free reign with the shots, I can’t post them. However, once the final brochure is designed for external distribution I’ll be able to post some.

Overall, it was a great learning experience. Looking over the nearly 1800 shots that I look over an eight hour shoot without a break, I’m very pleased with the results. My lighting skills have increased greatly, and I was able to capture exactly the sort of lighting that the designer asked for. Luckily she is putting my images with photos from an existing library, so I had something to look at while setting up.

One other factor that made the shoot work well was the fact that I had a makeup artist working for me. I think she sensed my inexperience and was a big help throughout the day, gently pushing me in this directon or that when I started to get lost. Nothing beats experience, and I was glad to have her there to help. Not to mention the huge difference a little powder and mascara and hairspray make on the finished product.

In reviewing the shoot, I’ve come up with a couple thoughts on how to improve from here:

Shoot slower, and more deliberately. I think I was shooting like a fashion photographer who has the equipment to do rapid fire bursts. Which basically means that I took a lot of frames before the strobes were had time to recycle, and they came out black. This meant that I often missed good shots by shooting an awkward pose, see a great one a split-second later, and missing it because the lights couldn’t keep up.

Control conversations. The client, her assistants, and the other subjects conversed with whichever person I was shooting at the moment in order to capture “candid” or conversational shots. This was great except that I had a hard time trying to keep the subjects looking at the camera. In future I’ll want to control the conversational factor a bit more so the subject is focused on me.

But in general I’m very pleased. I think the client was happy as well. I’m looking forward to sending these shots around the firm to help drum up some more business.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 10:41 am and is filed under On Assignment, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.