Welcome back for another installment of my monthly Behind the Camera Series. For those who are new here, this is a feature that I do on the first of every month where I talk about a topic that I don’t really have time to get into during my regular blog entries after each trek. Sometimes this could be a question that was asked during the month, or just a topic that I think might explain a bit more about what makes me tick, or maybe just photographers in general. The topic for this month comes from a rather unexpected source. It was Toni that made the observation during August I think, and it resonated with me enough to talk about it here.
We were talking about one of my portrait shoots that was coming up where I was doing a few things that I had never really done before. While nothing about it was objectively hard, I was doing my normal thing and overthinking the entire process and the setup. I had agreed to do the shoot because the actual mechanics of the lighting were simple and something that I was familiar with. However, after that initial technique consideration passed, I started to think about all the artistic and intangible things that I would need to bring to the shoot which got me doubting myself. This is a road that I am very much used to and have gotten to the point where I just expect it to happen before any shoot. Just about any time I have time to think about a session, I tend to get in my own head over it. This applies to not only portraiture but also landscapes and decay subjects in many instances. In fact, anything that I am planning in advance, I go through this period of being nervous to one extent or another.
So, what was it that Toni said to me that made so much sense? She said that I should always be nervous before a shoot given time to think about it. If I wasn’t nervous, then it meant that I didn’t care about what I was about to create. I had never really thought about it like that before, but she was absolutely right. The nerves were just my buy-in to the process and proof that I was invested in the outcome. Since we had that conversation, I have been paying particular attention to how I’ve felt before different shoots and finding more and more support to this idea.
I’ll start off by talking about the shoot that started this whole concept. The concept was a studio session with some very specific kinds of lighting involved. I knew that technically I could produce what was wanted, but since I don’t do that much portraiture, I eventually started to wonder if I would be able to do all the other stuff to get the poses and expressions right. I recognize that I am still at the stage in my portraiture where I know more of the technical end than I do the artistic end. This is backwards to how I learned landscape photography where I knew what I wanted to capture, but I had no idea how to make the camera do it. Now, I can make the camera do all kinds of things, but the artistic conceptualization of the photo is a bit more daunting since I am quite literally creating something that was never there to begin with. That is a huge departure from photographing scenes that are there and strike you as photogenic at the time you wish to capture them.
Ever hear that phrase, that your mouth is writing checks that your a$$ can’t cash? Well, that was what I felt like I was doing here and I really had to work through all that nervousness so that by the time the client got here, I was confident and ready to roll. The session actually went quite well and went smoothly once we got started. Once I stop thinking about things, the nerves generally go away, and I find my comfort behind the camera. We knocked out the shots with the lighting that she had wanted and then I moved on to lighting that I thought that she would find more flattering. The session went a couple of hours, and we ended up getting a bunch of photos for her to choose from. By the end of the shoot, I was feeling pretty good about the experience. That feeling got better during the processing phase of the session which went for the next two or three days. I had to break up this phase of the shoot over a longer period than usual because of other commitments which happened along the way.
Another great example of nerves getting in the way was a recent trek to Eastatoe Falls which you might remember reading about as October was getting started. This was a waterfall trek which falls under the realm of landscape photography, obviously. Now, I started out in photography back in 2005, doing landscapes. The first waterfall that I shot was in 2006, so it is safe to say that I have a lot of experience about how to photograph waterfalls and have even taught workshops on that very subject. There is absolutely no reason that I should be nervous about going and photographing a waterfall. Yet, in many ways I was nervous. It was a scheduled event where I had no control over the weather and no way to reschedule if the weather wasn’t good. It was a spot that I had never been before, and I was going with a friend which is not my normal way of going on a trek. I’m very much a go alone kind of guy when it comes to photography.
All of these things were working together to create a situation where nerves started to get the best of me. It was true that I had a lot going on during the month to follow that I needed to focus on, but I could slip in a quick waterfall trek without a problem. I still don’t know how close I came to not going on this trip, but I know that even on the day I left, I was open to anything getting in the way. In fact, I recaulked the bathroom before I left home for the trek which is not something I would ever consider doing under normal circumstances. I even had a very slow start to the trek the night before after arriving at the hotel. The plan was to get out and start to connect with the area to make the next morning go smoother. It didn’t go well at all, which got me even more concerned about how this waterfall photography was going to go.
Maybe we could have written off both of these examples as dealing with types of photography that I don’t do nearly as often as I would like. It could be that I am just not as comfortable with either subject as I would like to be, or think that I am. That would certainly lead to having some nervous feelings leading into the shoots. But what about something that I am much more familiar with? Like maybe decay…
Let’s go back to the Spring of this year when I had my last decay workshop. This is a subject that I am very well versed in and have been doing predominantly for the last five or more years. The location is one that I have been visiting for nearly a decade now and am pretty good friends with the owner. On this particular workshop, the attendees were both veterans from previous workshops and I had worked closely with them in the past. This is probably my most favorite workshop experience to put on and one that I have really fine-tuned over the years to the point where I could teach it in my sleep. Was I nervous leading up to the day. I sure as heck was!
It might have been the weather which was looking like rain, but I’ve dealt with the rain before and for this subject matter, rain isn’t a huge problem. I’m always worried about the conditions on workshops, but that should be just a passing worry, and not something that leads to nervousness. I was feeling full-on nerves for this workshop, just as I had for each one in the past. To counter this, I typically get out there early and try to center myself before folks start to get there. I walk around and see what things are looking like and occasionally get some photos like I did on this morning. All of this is to settle those nerves and get me in a better state of mind for the task ahead. The workshop ended up going very well and the conditions improved during the day in many respects.
For one more example, let’s look at another client shoot that I did last Summer. This client had both this ’57 Chevy Belair, and a ’64 (I think) Chevy pickup which had been restored that he wanted photos of, to put in his new shop. This session was actually started during the Fall the previous year when we decided that we wanted more color in the landscape. We started to look at the following Spring to actual do the session. There was a lot of time and energy spent in deciding when and where to do the shoot, but in the end, I had to make it work with his busy schedule which gave us a very small window during the middle of the day. Of course, things got pushed back until we were well into Summer for the actual time of the shoot which made for a very hot and bright day. This wasn’t really a shoot that I was nervous about until right before it happened. I was really feeling like I was in control of things until I realized that I was completely out of control and had to wing much of the shoot.
Seeing that the weather was not going to be on my side with very harsh light, I started to get very nervous, and by the time I was ready to begin the shoot, I didn’t know if it was the 95-degree temperatures or the nerves that were making me sweat. Whatever the case, it took me a little while of doing the photos to make me calm down and get into a groove. Even when I got into the groove, I never really felt at peace like I would have expected to. I mean, I was shooting cars from an era that I understood and loved the styling of, there were no people involved, and I was able to have the vehicles moved and placed where I wanted them to be. It should have been an easy shoot to work through, but there I was nervous about the whole thing.
Why is it that no matter what I am shooting, if I have time to think about it, I get nervous? What was so accurate about Toni’s statement that made me pull out my phone and jot it down for a topic for this feature? It was in that moment that I think I realized that I would always get nervous before a shoot, and the minute that I didn’t, it was probably time to hang the camera up. It really is that cut and dry. Now that I’ve been doing photography on a serious level for a tad over 20 years and have been doing it professionally for the last six years, if anything, I get more nervous now than before. A large part of that is these days there is more at stake because the likelihood of there being a paying client involved is very real. It is not uncommon to spend a day at a business taking a string of 15-20 headshots of the employes and pocketing a check well into four-digits. A studio session for a single client can start at $650 with two sets or outfit changes, and that is without any products being sold. Yes, doing photography for money will add to the nerves, but the thing is…that isn’t it. In fact, I have proof of that very concept.
You might recall a shoot that I did with a model from Charlotte in May of 2024. I didn’t blog about it, but I’ve mentioned it a time or two since that point. This was a free (TFP) session to add to her portfolio some styles that she did not have represented and it was a chance for me to expand my skills and add to my portfolio, so our services were offered without pay for mutual benefit. Take the money out of the equation, and there should be no nerves involved, right? Well, this one was almost crippling for me, and I spent most of the time wishing that she would cancel or flake out like I had heard models tend to do. Don’t get me wrong, I was looking forward to the session and really wanted to work with a model who knew more about posing and would allow me to focus on more of the things that I needed to work on such as lighting and set design. The issue was, I just didn’t think that I was going to be able to provide photos that were good enough for her portfolio which is rather impressive by the way. Check her out on Instagram if you would like to see more. Here I was just a simple landscape and decay photographer trying to expand into portraiture. I wasn’t a high-end fashion photographer like she was used to dealing with. All of those artist insecurities started to bubble up within me and the fact that the shoot took nearly six months to happen made it even harder to cope with.
When the time finally came to do the shoot, I was hoping that she would cancel at the last minute and thought that I had lucked out when she said that she was running late. She was still coming though, which was a mixed blessing in a way. I will say that after the first 15 minutes or so, things went so well, and I had a great time. The photos were phenomenal and looked better than I would have imagined. When it was all said and done, I was exhausted, but in a good way. The nerves were gone, and the session was over. There was no money exchanged for this shoot, she loved the photos and had some different looks to add to her portfolio. It was a great experience and should have made it to where I no longer got nervous for shoots like this. I had just played in the same sandbox as much better photographers than myself and didn’t get my bucket thrown at me.
So, what is with this nervousness that I can’t seem to shake? I think what Toni was getting at is exactly what the nerves represent. I’m emotionally invested in the shoot, or session, or workshop and because of that I have something to lose if it doesn’t go well. It isn’t the money, it isn’t the prestige (I have none of that to start with), it isn’t even my reputation because that has been built over too many years for one incident to really affect it. We all have off days, and those are an anomaly in the grand scheme of what has become my photographic career. What it all boils down to is that I care deeply about my craft and I want to always perform at my best, especially when others are there watching or included. With that in mind, I think it would be silly to even want the nerves to go away. If they did, it could only be because I no longer cared. The minute that happens is the minute that I need to stop being a photographer. This is an art and a craft which requires you to be emotionally involved with it. It is that sense of nervous energy that belies that you care about what you are doing.
There is also another fold to the equation. That is the fold where you take personal growth into consideration. Remember back when you were in school how you felt before a test was taken? You were being asked to recall information that you had learned and committed to memory. It shouldn’t be difficult to do, but we were always nervous. In many situations where I am looking at a session that has been planned, or I have time to think about it, I’m thinking about the techniques that I might use. It ranks right up there with studying for a test.
As I was writing the beginnings of this entry, I was in the midst of planning out a few portrait sessions. By a few, I’m talking about four very different sessions in a very short amount of time. It might have been that very thing that prompted me to start writing about this topic when I did. Each of these sessions had their roots around the end of July. I had just finished with the one studio shoot where I was doing an anniversary shoot for a couple that was celebrating their first year of marriage and had done a headshot for a client of mine in Huntersville where his employee came to the studio rather than me going back out to Huntersville. In just a couple of days I had run two different sessions in the studio and was kind of wanting to do more of that. While talking with the headshot client, she was very impressed with the way that the photo turned out and mentioned that her son and his wife were expecting their first child towards the end of the year. She asked if I would be willing to do a maternity shoot for them. That is something that I have wanted to try for a while and actually had one scheduled a few years ago before they canceled at the last minute. I gave her my card and said that I would love to speak with them about getting something scheduled.
It was also about that time that I decided after a while of considering it, posting on one of the Wilkes County Facebook Pages about looking to do some creative portrait sessions. I didn’t think that much would come from this and held off figuring the unanswered post would be a little embarrassing. Now that I was feeling pretty good about my people photography after several sessions in a short amount of time, I decided to post and see what happened. Well, to make a long story short, the post didn’t go unanswered. In fact, I think there were nearly 100 responses within a day. These responses ranged from folks just looking for a free portrait session for their kids, to others wanting their cars photographed. I started off responding to each and every comment with a message asking what they had in mind to see if it was something that I could use to stretch my creative boundaries, but eventually, I had to stop that because I was continuously messaging with dozens of people.
I ended up vetting the ones who responded the quickest and started to look at ideas that would work for them. What I ended up with was a boudoir session for one, a creative storytelling session for another, and just a fun creative session with a third. While I was getting more and more details figured out, I ended up booking the maternity shoot that was brought up after the last headshot. By the middle of September, I had a full plate in front of me when it came to portrait work, but I wasn’t nervous at all. I was looking forward to each of these sessions. It wasn’t until I left the abstract planning stage and started to get into the actual nuts and bolts of the individual sessions that the nerves started to hit.
The first of these sessions happened to be the boudoir session because that client was the first to get a date in the books, and I had until the beginning of October to get ready for that one. After talking with the client, it was decided that we were going to use three full sets, and I was going to make one of the sets pull triple duty for different moods for the different outfits. Speaking of outfits, there were going to be at least four, and at a time, it was looking like seven that might be used. I had to put together new sets and pick up several different props to make it all work with the colors and the style that she was after. It was also going to be the first time in quite a long time I was going to get to use my dedicated boudoir section of the studio. You might recall when I reworked that section of the studio with sheers on the walls to soften the concrete blocks. That was two years ago, and I haven’t had the opportunity to use it since that time. There was a lot going on in the planning stages, and then as we got closer, I had to figure out how I was going to light it all, with the idea of going for a very motivated lighting scenario that made sense with the different scenes. I was going all out for this one and realized that I was planning out a lot of different types of photographs for a single day’s shoot.
As expected, I got that same nervous energy going a couple of days before we were scheduled to shoot. I got up early on that Friday because she was supposed to get here around 10am or so. By getting up at 5am, that would give me time to rework everything that I had painstakingly put together over the previous days and get my mind right for the shoot. Not long after I woke up, I received a text that she was not feeling well and doubted that she would be able to make it. I did really appreciate her letting me know as early as she did, and I wanted her to be at her best for the session, so rescheduling wasn’t an issue. It was also a relief for me because I could breathe again. Later in the weekend, we ended up rescheduling for Sunday when she was feeling better. The nerves came back with a vengeance, and I was doing everything that I could to appear confident as the shoot was getting underway. It started off with her wearing a baseball jersey and some knee-high socks which we had planned for the begining of the shoot as we were getting more comfortable with the photographic process. I think that we might have both been a little nervous at that point because neither of us realized that she had forgotten to wear the socks.
Socks or no socks, she was fantastic in front of the camera, and I started to get into my own groove creatively. Just for conversation here, you can see some of the lighting that I had going on with this set. There was a blue gelled fill light over the scene which consisted of a pop-up backdrop, some boxes, and a black muslin flooring. I had a hard light in the upper right that was gelled yellow for the illusion of street lights spilling into the shadows, while the key light was a gridded softbox, camera right, slightly behind our subject. It was the first time that I had used quite such an elaborate lighting setup for such a simple scene, but it worked well and set the tone for the rest of the time we spent working together.
Near the end of the session, we moved into the dedicated boudoir set that I had refreshed a long time ago to soften the appearance of the block walls. I knew how I wanted it to look in concept but had never really tried it out. This was the first time, and I was understandably nervous leading into the session, but by the time we moved back here, the nerves were all gone and I was in my groove. The time I had spent working through the gelled lighting (two speedlights by the way) on the walls worked perfectly and we were able to just get to shooting after I moved the key light into place. It was the third set, and we were probably a bit over two hours into the session by this point. There was still one more pose that she was wanting to do during the day that I had kind of left till last because it was going to make use of the second set that I had put together, but it was going to require a lot of that set to be removed to leave just the wall as a backdrop. None of the basic set design did I have any reservations about because I had seen how well it had worked in earlier photos during the session. My concern was for the bouquet that I had put together. I can do a lot of things well, but I have realized that I am no florist, and when it comes to putting together flower arrangements, I have a lot to learn. I was just hoping that what I had put together would work for the photos and stay together long enough to get a few good shots.
Looking back on the arrangement, I didn’t really do half bad at all. I don’t know why I was so nervous going into this shoot. Oh wait….I really cared about the outcome and wanted the photos to be great and for the client to enjoy them as well as getting a bit of a confidence boost. Then there was the fact that I was doing lighting that I had never done on any substantial level before with the inclusion of gels and more shadows than I would normally have for the sake of modesty. OK, so maybe the nerves were justified for this shoot, but to look at the outcome, it wouldn’t appear that I had been the bundle of nerves that I really had been.
That is the part that I have to take away from looking at this phenomenon as we are doing right now. The nerves are going to be there, but it isn’t because I don’t know what I’m doing. Even in doing some portraiture that is stretching my creative ability, I am finding that I am well equipped to make it happen the way that I envision it. Knowing this, you would think that the nerves would go away. I mean, I spent three days working through a total of 69 photos that I delivered to the client. During that time, I was impressing myself with how well the photos looked straight out of camera and with just a little bit of post processing to polish them to amazing. I think I had a similar strut to my step as she did after her session. By the way, boudoir photography is not just about “sexy” photos, it is about building confidence and loving the body that you are in. That is the focus of my sessions, so if that is something that appeals to you, let’s talk.
Even though I was feeling like a much more capable photographer than I probably am, I had to shift gears for my next client. After delivering the final boudoir gallery on Wednesday (three-day turnaround for those who are counting), I had to start really focusing on the next session that was scheduled for Friday evening. Now, this session was something completely different for me, and something that by this point, I was starting to wonder if I had kind of overextended my abilities. It had started after that now infamous Facebook post with an email in addition to a comment on the post from a lady that was interested in taking part in this idea. We ended up talking on the phone a day or so later and I asked what kind of shoot she would be interested in. She wasn’t sure but said that she was having a birthday in October and was wanting to celebrate her recovery from addiction. OK, that seemed important to me, and I could feel the gears in my mind starting to move.
I asked her if she felt comfortable giving me the details of her recovery and she was very forthcoming and willing to share all the details with me. I’m not going to put her story here because it is Her’s to tell, but I will say that she has died more times than should be possible in a human life. The grips of her addiction were very strong and kept pulling her back many times over until she finally hit that point and decided she had to make a change. The story was inspiring, and without thinking about the implications or what was going to need to happen, I just blurted out that I wanted to capture her story in photos. I was going to need a few days to think about it and I would get back with her. She was excited and was fully onboard with the idea.
Now, I wasn’t nervous in the least as I started to have visions of what the one photograph would be that would tell her story. I started to think about a dramatic exit from a destroyed building with lots of mood and atmosphere surrounding her. She would be dressed in something elegant, though soiled in the lines of a fallen angel. She had told me about a deep scar on her chest from the time when everyone thought she had died after a car crash. The concept of “Scarred Angel” came to my mind and that sealed the deal. I talked to her about this idea and she loved it. That started out a search for a location to shoot it at, which ultimately ended up being at the Bluff’s Lodge at Doughton Park.
As we got closer to the rough time that we wanted to do the shoot in October, I was steadily planning the look of the shoot as well as how I wanted to light it. My initial thought was going to require lights as well as ambient light for fill. The dramatic lighting was almost a necessity, but this was going to be mixing strobe with ambient which I had only done seriously one other time for a shoot at blue hour which was a bit easier than doing it in the daylight. We talked about wardrobe, and how the pictures were going to support the story that I wanted to tell. There was a lot of planning here for the concept and it was all coming together very nicely. I wasn’t worried about it at all. In fact, there were no nerves involved all through the planning stages.
It wasn’t until I submitted the boudoir photos to the client that I flipped the switch to the upcoming shoot in just two days. All of a sudden, all of those nerves that I hadn’t been feeling rose right to the top. Was I going to be able to pull this off? I mean, building confidence in a boudoir shoot is one thing, but I was getting ready to tell a story that included every emotion under the sun, and I was going to do it without a single word. There was going to be no blog entry to support it, no video to explain it. It was going to have to stand on its own as a visual bit of storytelling. I had never attempted something so intense before, and this was a tribute to the life that she has lived and survived. I couldn’t afford to shank this one because I felt like her sobriety was now in my hands. Yeah, that might be a little over-the-top, but it was how I was feeling about this shoot. That was a whole new level of nervousness which was introduced.
I had a full shot list in my mind and even put it on paper because that one shot that I had envisioned turned into a series of shots that I wanted to get to show the different stages. At kind of the last minute, I was informed that her Mom was going to be coming out with her for the shoot and since her mom had been an ever-present force in her recovery, I decided to incorporate her into the shoot as well. So, after making sure that they were both agreeable, I altered the script of the evening. It was complicated enough in the scope of what I was trying to create but adding in the fact that I was needing certain lighting to tell different parts of the story, I was going to have to shoot it in pretty much the reverse order. This complicated things even more because the timeline was going to feel very wonky for all of us.
I arrived an hour or so before our scheduled start time which was giving us just two and a half hours before sunset to get everything shot. There was no lighting out there and for our safety from trips and falls, I needed there to be some light around us. I was going to add in strobe to allow the ambient light to look like night which was the technique that I was most nervous about doing having only done it once before, a couple of years ago.
Everyone arrived on time, and we started off with some basic portraits get us all comfortable with each other in this kind of setting. It also gave me a chance to work out the strobe part of the lighting without it having a huge effect on the actual story that I was going to capture. Usually, these first shots are one to throw away ones because the subject is still feeling a bit nervous about the shoot. Nerves work both ways and I am very aware of that fact. However, she rocked these early photos as well and I ended up keeping them and adding them into the story.
Now, since these photos are designed to be a story all on their own, I am going to leave a few examples of what we created for you to look at. This just barely scratches the surface because there was a total of 79 delivered photos because they were just all too good. See if you can read through the story just knowing the basic context of our scarred angel.
As the shoot progressed into the darkness and I started to really experience the emotion and mood that I had planned on capturing, I started to realize that this shoot was taking on a whole different level of importance from any other photo shoot I’ve done before. It was honestly starting to unfold on its own, and I no longer had to think about what was next. This session became a living and breathing event that I was just a part of. I felt that it was happening whether I was there or not. There was magic in the air, tears were flowing. It was amazing right up until Saturday morning when I woke up in a cold sweat.
I hadn’t been paying attention to the details like I would normally have done. I’m not talking about the details in front of my lens. I knew I had those covered. I loved the compositions that I had shot and didn’t see any issues with those at all. What I was now worried about was the fact that I hadn’t paid attention to my shutter speed during the moving segments like this last photo you see of her dancing. Sure, I had the camera set to not let it go beneath 1/250th of a second to keep camera shake from being a problem, but I hadn’t taken into account subject movement. I was just in the moment and that rookie oversight proves that fact. Had I just ruined 50 or more shots from the evening that were instrumental in telling the story. I could have dealt with a lot of motion blur, though I was hoping for sharp images. It was that in between that I was concerned about where things were just barely not sharp, enough to be a distraction. I rushed down to the studio and imported the photos to see what I had messed up due to a rookie error.
As I had said, this shoot had taken on a life of its own, and I was just a cog in the machine. It was all about our scarred angel. Fortunately, fate had shined on her and the existing lighting, even though cloudy, was bright enough to keep my shutter speed at 1/1000th without the auto ISO kicking in at 1/250th. Everything was sharp and had worked out amazingly well. The next three days were spent down at the computer processing the images to give them the right mood for the different stages. The more I worked with the photos, the more I understood aspects of her life that I hadn’t really understood before. These photos affected me on a level that I have never experienced before. They were powerful and said so much. I just wish that I had been the one to put the thought into them. Other than coming up with the concept and shot list, I really felt like this was an out-of-body experience for me, and I don’t know how I managed to capture this wonderful story.
The nerves were all gone because I knew that I had nailed it. I was pretty positive that my client was going to love these, and I started to get the urge to do an in-person reveal. I ran the idea by Toni who had been with us for a good bit of the shoot. She said that would be a great idea and added that this is her absolute favorite shoot that I’ve ever done because of what it represented. I suggested to my client that we do an in-person reveal and she accepted. All of a sudden, the nerves came right back to the forefront. The shoot was over, what was going on? I knew that the photos were excellent and there wasn’t a single one of the 79 that I didn’t think deserved to be in the collection. What was going on?
Well, now I was going to actually see the expressions when she first views her story in photo form. Would I get the reaction that I was hoping for, or would I get a series of “that’s nice,” “great pic”, or “you did good.” What I was hoping for had nothing to do with words. I wanted to see pride in herself for what she had accomplished. I wanted to see tears for having done such a great job in front of the camera. I wanted her to see that this was all about her, and that she had done such an amazing job going back through the hardest thing that she has ever done in her life. Yeah, I was nervous about how this reveal was going to go.
Because we had shot this in roughly a reverse order, with some exceptions for a series of pictures that I needed emotions to be in the right order, I knew that the storyline was going to be messed up tabbing through the photos in Lightroom. I didn’t feel like custom naming each photo to keep it in the correct order, so I did a quick PowerPoint presentation with the slides in the most effective order for the presentation. It only took an hour to do and allowed me to present the photos in a chapter form which I thought fit my vision quite well.
When they arrived to look at the photos, I was a bundle of nerves and couldn’t wait to see their reaction. The slideshow took about an hour to go through, and we talked through the photos and relived certain moments from the actual session. The tears started to flow again, and I knew that this whole session had been worth it. I had put an undue amount of pressure on myself feeling responsible for her sobriety through this experience, but in the end, I really feel that I have strengthened her resolve by giving her a look back into what it felt like in the grips of her addiction. Like I said…POWERFUL.
With that shoot wrapped and the photos delivered, I was now set to focus on my next session which was the maternity shoot. This was going to be pretty low key in relation to the previous two since I was going back to Doughton Park which I am very familiar with, using only ambient light, and working in a style that I am very used to with my landscape photography. No reason to be nervous about this one, but I could feel the nerves coming back once again.
The nerves were a little different this time though. I found that I wasn’t as worried with the basic concepts of the shoot such as location and posing. Those were going to be pretty straightforward and having met with the couple, I felt that creatively, we were on the same page. This time, I was more nervous about the location. More specifically, the time of year that we were going to be using the location. You see, this is now peak leaf season along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Doughton Park should be at about peak which will bring many people there. With the Parkway now opened on both sides of the park, there is a lot more traffic going by and stopping. Having to work around lots of people is not my idea of fun, and it certainly doesn’t make for an easy day behind the camera. Even the previous shoot that I did by the Lodge had two other photographers doing their own sessions on either side of us which I had to take into consideration. I had a feeling that this upcoming session was going to be very similar, if not more crowded. There will always be something that will lead to a certain level of stress or anxiety before a shoot, and all of that falls into the realm of the nervousness. At least this time, I wasn’t worrying if I could pull the shoot off. Nothing that I was doing would be different from what I’ve done before short of photographing a pregnancy.
Just to get my mind in the right place to photograph something as joyful as a pregnancy after working on such an emotional and deep session, I decided to go out to Doughton Park to get a little landscape photography time in. This would allow me to get back in tune with the beauty of the landscape and be better able to link that aspect in with the maternity aspect. Was I nervous about this trek? No, not really. There was no pressure on me, and if I didn’t get anything from the time there, then I would be the only one to miss out on anything. Any nerves that I felt were for my clients as I was really wanting the location to work out and that was where I was putting pressure on myself.
When I arrived, there were a lot of people there and I realized just how hard it was going to be to get photos where I really wanted them as I was going to have be sharing space with others who were enjoying the park. Of course, I had absolutely no intention of asking anyone to move because we all had a right to be there. It just meant that I might have to get creative with some of the settings and compositions. The trek itself went very well, and I was hopeful that the next day would provide many opportunities for great photos for the couple. That was when the nerves set in though. The weather was supposed to be pretty much clear which meant that I was going to be battling with the sun until golden hour which wasn’t going to be long enough for me to get done what I wanted to provide for the clients. I was going to have to really pay attention to the light, and I was going to have to do it without Toni by my side. She had the opportunity to go to Georgia to visit with our granddaughter for her birthday which developed at the last minute. I wasn’t going to reschedule my clients, so I continued on solo without having her help for things like reflectors or holding a light stand. There was also the complete absence of her great advice on posing couples which I have come to rely on.
I just had to put on my big photographer camera strap and take full responsibility for this shoot. Fortunately, it came after several other portrait sessions, and I was starting to feel more at ease with them just due to the familiarity with the process now. I was still nervous, but it was manageable this time. The basic structure of the shoot was outside, on location, with natural light. I wasn’t having to think about studio strobes or mixing lighting for this session, although I did decide that it was a smart idea to bring a softbox for my Speedlites in case I had to massage the existing light with any of the scenes. That was it, and I was able to carry it all easily as we were going to be on the trails along the meadow.
I arrived at the park about an hour before the shoot was scheduled to begin and scoped things out one last time. The light was completely different than it had been the night before and that got me scared because the sun was very harsh. It was not flattering and was very difficult to look towards for me or for my clients. The area that I had thought about starting in didn’t pan out because of the existing light and there was no good way to make it work. I panicked a little bit but went up the trail to a field to check out an alternate location that I was going to shoot after that first scene. The light here was good with the tall grass, but the directions that I could shoot were limited. I figured out the right angle and called it done. That was going to be where we were going to start off.
My clients arrived just a tad early which was great. I always stress my clients having issues finding the location or just showing up late as a matter of course. For a shoot like this when I am literally working right up to when the light is gone, I worry that I’ll miss out on valuable time and great photos. That wasn’t the case with this family as they were right there and ready to get to work. The field idea worked out very well and gave us time to get to know each other in this type of setting to be ready for some more complex settings to work within. That came from a touch of shade along the trail that I wasn’t really expecting but I saw the opportunity as we were walking and put it to great use. In fact, we were going for the Fall vibe hence the color choices in their wardrobe, so this setting worked fantastic. The shade took away the issues that the sun was causing and provided some nice highlights in the background and some of the foreground tall grass where I was kneeling. The nerves were long gone at this point because I knew that if nothing else, I had at least six great images of them already between three different locations that we had shot in. Everything else was just going to be gravy.
One of the next spots that we stopped at was up at the top of the meadow where I had planned on working many photos around that tree that I love so much. Well, that wasn’t going to happen because there was another photographer doing family photos under that tree. This was where all the stress and planning come into play and benefits me greatly. I had some other alternatives around that area that I could also use for our session. One of them was the bank of rocks near the tree. After making sure that my clients were comfortable sitting on the rocks, I got them positioned and started getting some shots. They were turning out fine with the warm sunlight coming from the side, but the sky was overexposed for my tastes, and I decided it was time to bring out the Speedlite and softbox to create some of my own light allowing for a darker sky behind them.
This was both a great choice, and a lousy one all at the same time. I needed the light, and what I had brought was just enough power to do what I wanted it to do. That was the great choice, but the less than ideal angle of the ground caused me some concern. Not having Toni here to hold the light stand, or even the softbox without a stand, meant that I was going to have to weigh the stand down with my camera bag to keep it from toppling over. Well, that worked for about a dozen frames or so until I could see that the images in review were looking dark. When I looked up, I realized that the stand had fallen over without barely making a sound.
The light was turned off somehow, so I clicked that switch the two positions to turn it back on again, but I realized that it was not longer set as a slave light and there were a lot of things on the panel that I wasn’t familiar with seeing. I tried to get it sorted out but wasn’t able to do it in a short enough time that I was comfortable making them wait. I retrieved the slightly smaller light from my bag and put it in the softbox and got right back to shooting. It is situations like this that make me nervous to begin with, but those nerves often make me work through imagined issues so that if they happen, I can recover quickly as I did here.
With the lighting disaster averted, I was able to continue on with things and finally was able to get over to the tree that I had wanted to shoot under. I did some solo shots as well as both of them together here and then felt that the lighting and setting were right for a bit of dancing. This provided some very beautiful shapes within the scene that complemented the dancing tree as I have come to recognize it as. The light here was very good, but I knew that was going to be the case after years of shooting this tree at different times of day. We shot here until the sunlight was pretty much gone as it was that warmth that really brought the magic to the scene. That left me with one of the last tricks that was up my sleeve.
After she sent me a photo of the dress that she was going to wear I was inspired to do a dress toss. Ideally this would have been a very flowy dress with enough material to do its own toss, but that wasn’t the case. I did want to capture that mood, so I started trying to source some material that matched the dress so that we could get one of these shots if the wind would cooperate. As my flash had indicated, the wind was good for this kind of shot, so we started to attach the material to her dress, and I trained her husband how to toss it. He was a quick study which was very good because the light was fading fast at this point. I didn’t have time to set the Speedlite up again, so I just hoped that I could get the right exposure without it. Those nerves beforehand which had caused me to question everything had caused me to come up with solutions to problems that weren’t even there yet. I was thankful for that.
By the end of the two hours, I had released the shutter 305 times. Of those, I delivered 64 images to the clients less than 48 hours after we had arrived in the parking lot at Doughton Park. I had not needed to be nervous about this shoot because it went so very well, as had the previous two sessions; yet I was nervous and I was thankful for it. These nerves that I have before a shoot, or a workshop, or anything else that matters to me cause me to problem solve before I even get into the position of having problems. For that reason alone, I am really happy to be nervous, and I think that Toni is absolutely right about nerves leading up to a photo shoot. It means that I really do care about how things are going to go, and I want it to appear seamless for the client without any interruptions, like a broken light. If an interruption happens, I want to have a solution in my mind already so that I can adapt and move on. It is those thoughts that will probably always have me nervous before a client shoot, or any other interaction with a client where they are depending on me to provide a service.
In the end, I suspect that nerves will always be a part of my photography and after really looking at it in detail, I have chosen to embrace the nerves rather than try to stifle them. Because of the nerves, I am able to troubleshoot before the session even starts and work through several different plans as well as fine tune concepts that I thought were solid to begin with. Who knows, nerves might actually be a tool that is worth having in the box for many different things in photography.
This Behind the Camera has kind of taken on a life of its own, which they do tend to do from time to time. I didn’t really mean to get this much in depth with my portrait work, but that is where this story ended up. If you will look back over what I have done through the month of October, you will see that I have been really quite absent in the blogs because I just haven’t had the time or energy to go out on any treks. I didn’t want anyone to think that I haven’t been busy or might have been going into a slump as I have in the past. The truth of the matter is I have created more photography this month than I have in any previous month. It just so happens that the photography that I have been creating isn’t the focus of this website which remains primarily based in landscape and decay work. I made the promise when I started with portraiture that I would try to keep that out of the blogs as much as possible, and generally I do just that. These three sessions that I have just finished are special ones in several different ways and I think are very good markers as to my growth as a portrait photographer.
I’ll get into more detail with this when the year in review installment comes out on New Year’s Day, but I’m at a point where I am needing to make some serious decisions about my portrait work and how much emphasis I am going to put on it in the future. I’m still not sure where it will end up, but I am feeling really good about my abilities right now, I just have to see if there is a market for it in this area. There is a lot of equipment and overhead tied up in my portrait work and there are many times that I miss the simplicity of having one camera bag and a tripod to handle everything that I shot. If I can make a business out of portraiture, then it is worth keeping it all in place and growing it as needed. That is a discussion for another time though.
In the meantime, if you are interested in making me nervous and booking a portrait session, let’s talk about what you are wanting. I’ll do everything that I can to make it happen for you.
I appreciate you joining me for this installment of Behind the Camera and I hope that you have found it informative and that it has given you a bit more information as to what all goes through this brain of mine when I am doing client work. I do enjoy sharing these things with you and putting it out there for other photographers to know that they aren’t alone when it comes to nerves. As we have seen nerves aren’t nearly as problematic as we might have thought at the beginning.
Until next time….
