Lessons

Lesson Info

Communicate with Your Team

Communicating with your team is so important. So all this stuff that we just did, all this pre-work, is all gonna go into communicating with your team. If you're like, "Dear model, I want you to pose like this." "Dear designer, can we bring clothes like this?" Or "Dear friend who has cool clothes, "can we bring clothes like this?" "Dear makeup artist, "I am going to be photographing somebody "full-length, from a long ways away. "I want dark, heavy eye makeup. "Don't spend a ton of time on it. "Don't spend a ton of time doing details "because nobody is gonna see it." Or, if you're gonna be shooting beauty head shots with someone close up in the studio, you're like, "Dear makeup artist, "We're gonna spend a lot of time "photographing really close up shots. "Can you spend a little bit of extra time "making those little lines perfect? "Let's amplify your skill, "let's show everyone what you can do." If you can talk your team and communicate with them, very clearly, then all of a sudden eve...

rything's gonna make a lot more sense. One of the things, by the way, I know we'll talk about this going forward again, but has anybody here taken a makeup class? If you retouch faces, have you taken a makeup class? Yeah! They're awesome. They're so interesting. If you photograph faces, take a makeup class. Take a crappy one on the weekends, or get a makeup artist that you know to come and hang out and explain makeup to you. I used to run a course that was makeup for photographers. It wasn't photographers learning to install makeup, but how do you talk to your makeup artist? How do you get what you need from your makeup artist? And then how do you retouch the makeup from the makeup artist? Because lots of makeup artists I talk to were heartbroken because they do such incredible work on the face and the photographer just burned it all out and made black, and they're like "But all the details!" Then they can't use the images because it doesn't show their work off very accurately. One of the things I learned that was extremely helpful that I didn't know, that when you put makeup on a face, and then you send them outside to where it's hot, or outside to where it's cold, the color of the makeup on the face changes. I noticed this in some of my earlier work, where I was like "Why does she have a line? "She didn't have a line in the studio! "And now there's a line on her face, when did this happen?" And it's just because the temperature changed. So if you can tell a makeup artist and say, "Hey, we're gonna be photographing outdoors, natural light, "it's gonna be hot, it's gonna be a little bit sweaty "but we're shooting far away. "Don't spend tons of time on detail. "Make sure the color is gonna work for her skin "once her temperature warms up, "because you're going from air conditioning to hot, "and then make sure it's not gonna run when she sweats." Something to think about. And that's assuming, of course, you're photographing women, men, if you're putting makeup on them, same thing. Skin is skin. Well, it's not skin if you take a makeup course. (chuckles) In other case, these things, going forward, are extremely helpful, even if you just get a makeup artist to sit down and be like, "Explain this witchcraft to me, "because I don't get it." It's going to help going forward. Same thing if you're communicating with your hair stylist. You're sitting there and you're like, "Okay, we're gonna be shooting stuff "that's front of the face only." Well, they can do whatever they want in the back. We photographed this one chick a few years ago, and we stuck a ton of stuff in her head. The hair stylist was like, "Do I have to worry "about making the back look nice?" I said, "We're not gonna see the back of her head." She's like, "Oh, thank God." (chuckles) So she brought all the hair forward into this headpiece thing, and the back of her head looked like straw bales, because there were feathery things sticking out, and they were poking her in the neck and everything. In other case, it was like, yeah, we don't have to worry about that. Don't spend time on stuff that we're not gonna see. When we were photographing our subject, which we're gonna edit today, as you'll see, it was really windy. So I told the hair stylist, "Loose curls, it's gonna get destroyed anyways. "It doesn't matter, it's fine." So then she knows to put a ton of hair spray in it, to do the best that she's gonna do, and understand that the wind is gonna make a mess of it all. But all I wanted was that little bit of texture. So being able to tell her that, she wasn't trying to make perfect ringlets that were gonna last. Being able to tell your team that, hey, this is what's going on. And then tell your model, "Hey, it's winter out. "You're gonna be freezing, please put leggings on." (chuckles) Or what works really nicely, you know those little hot packs? We're in Seattle, people, do you guys use those? It doesn't get that cold here. (chuckles) But those little hot packs, if you're out in the cold, what I used to do a lot when I was modeling, is because you have these arteries on the insides of your thighs, tape those suckers to your leg. (chuckles) They keep you way warmer, so if you're wearing something that's long, or you're not gonna see the legs anyways, then you can keep somebody a little bit warmer in colder temperatures. If you're the type that likes to make people freeze, some ways to keep your team happy. Do we have any questions on that? I was just gonna jump over to the next patch slide. Let me take a peek. One question folks have is, do you have your team all over in different cities, how's the best way to communicate? Do you do Skype calls, or emails, what's your best practices for that? Skype calls are fun, for communicating with everybody, because I travel a lot, so I have different groups of people around the world. The nice thing about working with repeat people is they know your habits, and they're like "She likes lots of black stuff on the eyes, "that raccoon thing is fun." So they know that probably it's what I'm gonna ask for. But I love to send a ton of images, so that's gonna be in the mood boards going forward. I'll text them, I'll email them, whatever. I'll be like, "This is kind of loosely "what I'm looking for." But I also like to give people enough creative room to do what they do best. So if I go to a designer and I'm like, "Hey, I want a big, poofy, fluffy thing, "roughly this color, that'd be cool. "But what would you do, "if you could do anything you wanted?" And every now and then they come up with something, I'm like, "I never thought of that! "That is so awesome!" Because I'm not a designer. I don't design clothes, I don't know how that stuff works. It's magic to me, it's witchcraft, it's totally like, how do you take something that's a bolt of fabric and make something awesome? I don't work that way. I like to be able to give them, like I do with my stories, the general guidelines. The previous sketch, the color palette, whatever. Then I'm like, "Okay, do your thing." Same thing with makeup and hair people. I'm like, "Okay, this is our blank slate. "Our model is our blank slate. "What can we do with her that looks really cool? "Within these boundaries, "because I want to do a really badass military chick. "What makes sense for that?" Okay, well, if we're gonna do a military chick, generally there's certain rules that have to be for makeup and hair in the military. Different countries have different rules. Okay, we take that into consideration, then we play within those rules. Then it's like, "Okay, makeup artist, do your thing." And all of a sudden they contour their face and I'm like, "Wow, I never thought of that, that's great." Still giving them enough direction, because you're the one, if you're the creative director on the shoot, which is not always the case, but if you are, you want to hold enough of the reins on your team to keep them going the same way, but still let them do their thing. Does that make sense? Did I squirrel around on that way too much? That was good? Okay. Sometimes I get distracted. Squirrel moments happen. (man chuckling) What's up? So Renee, what do you use for mood boards? Right now I'm just using Pinterest, I'm trying to find something that will piece it together better. Do you have any ideas? This is actually a question that I knew was gonna come up, and I'm gonna show an example of one of my mood boards, but I'll honestly stitch things together into one PSD file, or a JPG, or flatten it all together. I'm like, this is it. Or, honestly, if I have their phone number, I just text them a whole bunch of images so it's in the text chat conversation and we can just scroll back. I probably should be more professional about it, but it works so far. (chuckles) Pinterest is great though, DeviantArt is great. You could make a Dropbox folder. If you use SmugMug, you can make private galleries for everyone, where everyone loads up their ideas and stuff like that. There's so many different ways, it's finding the way that works best for you. Pinterest, I think, works pretty well for people. What's up? One more question before we go off of this slide. There's a person in there that's an amateur, no team, how do I cope, what do you suggest? So no team, how do you cope? Yeah, you were there at one point, right? Oh yeah, totally, I think we were all there. Even sometimes I'm still there. (both chuckle) Show up somewhere, I'm like, "Everybody's sick." If you have no team, no nothing, the internet is your best friend. Finding subjects who are half decent at doing their makeup, and then learning to retouch it really well is always good. I know in certain countries you can't be a makeup artist without a license, I think the States is one of them. You can not apply makeup unless you have your cosmetology certification or something like that. I'm not American. (chuckles) Some countries, you can learn to apply the makeup on people, if that's something you're interested in. Otherwise, find people, even if you're in school. For example, when I was in high school, I always had that friend that was amazing at makeup. You're like, "What, how? "I'm screwing on eyeliner and it's just looking terrible, "but you look amazing." Generally, if we kind of reach out a little bit into our circle, that can help. Worst case scenario, absolutely worst case scenario, you can get really good at retouching and do your own makeup on them in digital art. It adds a lot of time, and it's a lot nicer to have a team. There's lots of places to meet people as well. Of course, this is the world of social media and the internet. Really, we have no excuse for ignorance anymore. Ignorance is just a temporary state on the slide through to education and expanding our minds. So we all started in that "We don't know what we don't know" category, and then we start going on that. If you're totally stuck and you have no skills and there's nobody around you, understand that, okay, I'm gonna have to talk to people. Maybe somebody's mom used to be a cosmetologist and maybe she can help out with this or whatever. It's getting out there, unfortunately being social, and photographers are not always the most social bunch. We're kind of like, leave me alone with my camera. But you've gotta do stuff that scares you if you want to get what you need done. I just wanted to add, you kind of mentioned this earlier, finding people that like to do cosplay. I found a friend at a renaissance festival, and she dresses up in like, everything, and has all these wigs, and can do her own makeup, and she is just like, "Hey, you wanna go shoot this today?" And I'm like, "Sure!" Somebody that's into dressing up and doing those things are great to do that too. Yeah, exactly, and that's something I'm gonna touch on here going forward, is on the next batch of nuclear bomb slides.