The further I get into my photography career, I have found myself experimenting less and less on the fly. Everything has a plan, a concept, a location. I know exactly what I want to shoot, how I want to light it and can see the finished image in my head before I press the shutter.
When I first started out, especially when I first started working with models, it was very much the opposite. A model and I, or a group of models and photographers would meet up at a location with nearly no preconceived ideas about what were wanted to shoot. When we arrived at the location we’d scout, light, choose wardrobe, everything on the fly. We let the photo evolve out of what we had available to us at the time. Creativity just happened, it wasn’t planned.
This past weekend I had the urge to just go out and shoot something. I have a few setups I’d like to shoot Jazmin Riley for an editorial I have in mind. In response to my shoot proposal, Jazmin said, “You don’t shoot anything without a plan. Why don’t you go out, scout your location and we’ll shoot it next weekend.”
I didn’t have a plan and that’s exactly how I wanted to shoot. We decided to do a shoot and we weren’t even going to leave the apartment to do it. We quickly paged through folders of inspiration photos and found a concept to build off. Once we had our concept, we headed to the bathroom, filled up the tub, cut the heads off some dried flowers, tossed them in the water, followed by Jazmin.
I’ve grown accustomed to using my monolights everywhere I shoot, but that just wasn’t going to work in the small cramped space. Instead I grabbed one of my speedlights, attached it to the shower rod with a justin clamp, strapped a pocket wizard to it and we started to shoot.
Nothing about this shoot was planned, not even the processing. We both liked the photos straight out of the camera, but thought it’d be cool to take them in a different direction than my standard processing. After tweaking the curves to get a cross processed look and muting the colors a bit, this is what we ended up with.
