Two "Pretty Wild" Lessons Learned (Part 2)

Okay here it is, part 2 of the "Pretty Wild" Lessons Learned. So in part 1 I was talking about communication. I was mainly talking about communicating with your talent so that you can build a connection with them. No matter how brief your time may be with the talent, if you don't bridge the gap in between the "Hello" and the "Good-bye," your results may not be as good as they could have been if everyone was comfortable with one another. And let me remind you, the communication is not only to make the talent feel better, but it will help you relax and your results will be noticeable.

So in part 2 I think another great lesson I learned was to be prepared. Be ready for sudden change in the situation and to deal with it the best you can. And the best way to stay on your toes, is to ask as many questions as necessary to your client. And make sure that you listen and understand what they need as well.

So when I was called into do the photo shoot with Tess Taylor and Alexis Neiers, I was told some pretty basic stuff. The girls were going to meet with a lingerie company, Biatta Intimates, try some outfits on, and I was there to capture the girls in their outfits. So let me break this down for you. My helpers/advisors (Maria Carmel, Robert Dahey) and I arrived at the designated call time. The girls arrived a bit later. So in the mean time we did some handshaking and meet all the people we would be dealing with for this shoot (see, even though they weren't the talent, communication from all sides is very valuable). So after meeting a number of people from the crew I went and spoke with the person in charge, and asked her what she was expecting from me. She told me what kind of work they were looking for, some ideas they had and I told her what I thought would and wouldn't work. I made sure I knew how many looks there were so I could have a variety of locations and not have to repeat any. I even made sure to ask what kind and color the outfits would be so that they would be complimented by their surroundings. So once we were on the same page about that we had a bit of time to kill because the girls had to arrive and then they had a number of scenes they needed to shoot in order to build up to the photo shoot.

So right away my team and I sprang into action. We walked all over the small studio and figured out where we would want to shoot. We found a number of locations. Some outside and some inside, mostly the latter. I think we managed to find enough location so that we had more then there were outfits, just so we had some room to play with. In the end that really helped us because by the time we got to shoot the girls we had pretty much lost all of out natural light and all the outside location we had weren't going to work anymore. So we ended up having just as many location as we did outfits. Now had I just been making up location as we were done with one look going onto the other, I would have found myself with even less time then I had for each look with the girls. One of the last prep things we did was one of the most important ones of all, our lighting. My team and I made sure that we had a basic understanding of our lighting look, so that in each location we basically knew how strong or weak we wanted the lighting to be. So when the girls were camera ready, we knew the outfits, the location for each one and the lighting.

So you can see how being prepared really helped us out and it made the crew happy too because I knew my locations and could tell them right away what would be next so they could get their stuff ready. By talking to the people in charge, seeing what they expect of you and using your time wisely we saved ourselves a lot of headache.

I hope you found these last two post beneficial. Trail and error has been a friend of mine for quite some time. On a different note, I really wanna wrap this post up with a huge thank you. Thanks to everyone involved with the production. You were all wonderful to be around and it was a pleasure to work with you all. But the biggest thanks would have to go to my peeps Maria and Robert. Check out their work, it is so amazing!! I could not have done this without you two, thanks again!!!

Adam