Lessons

Lesson Info

Right Brain Needs a Left Brain/Shooting Planning

Every right brain needs a left brain, of course, so I want to move a little bit on now to talking about left brain on talking about the role that matthew plays as part of the ms aniela brands that we are nowadays, miss daniela has gone from being just not just my name to more like a brand name and that's, largely with his him coming on board as doing a lot of the left brain stuff to start with. What timing? By left brain, I mean organization, business negotiation, technical lighting about these things that I was doing bits off myself. I mean, one person can't do everything themselves anyway, so it's a term it's, a case of two people sharing it, branching out, having a member of a team helping you do things and a lot of photographers, a lot of people in anything where they're starting out, doing a business needs at some point gets someone else to help them because they have so much to do. So matthew is in large part of what it does is helping me do everything we do everything together, ...

but also he takes care ofthe things that I would be, that I would consider to be more in night with this left brain organizational element, logistical, as they say so. The importance of team members, you know, it's, not just about working with a partner, it's also about any team member that you take on board, even the team members and, you know, the styling and the makeup and the hair that you start to recruit as you get more involved in fashion, I'm talking about those people as well things that you don't wantto or can't are not as good at doing yourself. You call upon someone else to fill that role, and then you find that they actually can be better at doing that role than you are, and that leaves you to do where you are strongest at now, I want to give you an anecdote as well, which I think really, perfectly sums up the I guess, the evolution from what we're calling lo fi, the kind of origin off being simple, improvised, minimalist methods, you know, lower budget doing things, kind of on shoestring to the hi fi, involving more production elements involving bigger budgets involving more ingredients. So this anecdote, years back when I was first offered a commercial job commercial brief to do an image for a book, and it was quite exciting because it was the first time someone was giving me an amount of money just straight up and saying, you know, I want you to create this for us. And I was really excited about it, and I didn't actually really ask the right questions at first because I was not extremely experienced at that time, there's something that I was first getting into, so I didn't know exactly what this budget was supposed teo entail there's a very important question to ask you want to know if someone gives you a budget, which is great, they've already answered that question that you would ask anyway, what's your budget, but then you want to know what do they expect for that budget? Because the budget and the briefer relative to each other and it might be a great budget, but if they want you to do a million things for that budget and obviously it's no good. So anyway, this job involved shooting a model in a particular location in a library location, so I went and found a shop I could shoot this model in, and I got this model from wherever online, I think model mayhem I used to source this model andi I the location I got for free, so I was kind of please, I thought or great for free. I didn't ask for it for free, but they've said I can come and use our shop. And I also source the clothing myself, I didn't know one hundred percent, whether it was exactly right for the job. I just kind of almost guessed a little bit about this clothing, bought it from a shopping, then took it back afterwards, parts of it, some parts, but and then so I shot this thing, andi, I shot in the way that I crops that this is I shot it in the way that I shoot my support traits, everything was pretty much on a shoestring, andi I went home and I worked on it in the way that I was in the way that I would work on one of my self portrait, so I was putting together all these pictures and folk shop to make the ideal composition it in the way that I was working with standalone picture, so working way on then presented it to the client, and they didn't like it, so I thought, oh, you know, I don't like my picture and then asked me if if I had any other pictures to show them, and I said, well, yeah, I could show you the other pictures I shot, but they weren't any good because they were very different from a compass it I presented it was something that I'd woven together in my in the way that I do artistically but they wanted to see options and this was something crucially that I was missing about this particular kind of job which is they wanted to see a lot of options off shots, raw shots from the shoot so they can actually look at what pose they want and they can look at the foundation they want so is very different from the way that I work on my self portraiture in the way that I kind of beaver away in private and present something finished and done so I considered it to be a dead end I thought payal won't failed with this that's fine but that matthew stepped in and he said, look, why don't we go and hire a different location? Why don't we hire this location? It will cost this amount of money which is a lot more than doing a location for free obviously but I thought, okay, well I'll talk to the client and asked if they can offer a little bit more money too use this location and so I went back to them and I said can we work in this location? He said okay and we chose different model on we also have the clothing sent from the client as well, which helped because I knew that exactly what they wanted to wear and we reshot it and I had a contact sheet of about one hundred fifty pictures to present to the client and they were able to they were overjoyed with them and they picked out the picture they wanted. I did a little bit of post work to it, but they mostly wanted to do a lot of the post work themselves, so that was a job that was the job they wanted me to do, which I'd approached in a very low fi way, which in my particular case wasn't appropriate. But when we stepped up and we said, okay, we need this this this to make it work, do you have this bit of extra budget? If I don't know that to begin with, that would be very much more in line with our work now, because how work now is I've got the experience to know what's involved in a shoot on dh, the quality that matthew and I as a team want to bring to a shoot on from that from that shoe onwards, we decided that would be that was that was how we're gonna work. We're not going to do things on cheap, we're goingto make sure we've got the budget to do it properly in the way that we envisage. And if there is, you know that if the client isn't happy that it may be that the job's not for us, but that's, how we want to work and that's, why we want to put forward so I want to talk a bit about the creative life shoots that we've been planning because this who is really a great situation for me to basically paint a picture of all this stuff I'm talking about when it comes to planning and production and all these ingredients, all of this time that goes into preparing something and how we actually comes about to the real thing as you will be seen tomorrow. So when we first started planning our creative life workshop, we knew we wanted to do a shoot where we could actually show realistically how we work with these ingredients with a styling styling team on the the caliber styling we really like to work with nowadays, and we wanted to work on location that's, one of the key things because I was shot on location, even myself, poor traits, you know, I've shot in a studio very rarely only when I was starting to do workshops, and it became the most appropriate place to do a workshop at first, but naturally we lead on to doing this. You experience events with locations because that's what we naturally wanted teo do on also think about locations is that I just find I feel at home in them because they're part of my inspiration work for their part of inspiring me to what I want to create and I wanted to make that happen for real on the crazy life workshop so that it really ties into everything I'm saying now so when we first started planning we the main thing what you said she was his location so matthew initially brainstormed and googled loads places in seattle he also had creative live team looking for locations as well. Now the thing about location is it has to fit any number of criteria obviously you have any particular thing in this case? We needed it to be available on the dates we wanted needed to make sure it's khun is suitable for all the needs of crave live as well as our needs. It needs to be in our budget. It needs to be interesting enough for me to feel like I can create something close to what we do nowadays in in the the visions that we put together on dh yeah, so we we went on the hunt now one of the one of the locations that we narrowed it down to there's quite a few on the potential list but this is one of the ones that we came close to using, which is forty squali on dh is an outdoor location so instantly we're worried about the weather in seattle whether that would work and that that would be a very big unknown but also not just the outdoor but the I was looking at pictures of this on wondering whether I could really I feel I guess it was some cliche but that spark of passion what could really draw me teo to making a picture come together what what what do my eyes go when I look at these pictures so is looking at pictures off the place it looked like it had a lot of space, a lot of options off texture but I was still kind of hunting for something that drew my eye in because the thing about the crave life shooters we wantto shoot mainly you know we want to go from one particular picture we don't have all all day to shoot that one particular picture we've got other things to do as well, so I wanted it to be one obvious grandiose place that was very compact where we could work in on really work on holding that picture so I can show you the process to it. So is also looking at the natural light that spilled into a lot of these textured room's in the fourth and squirrely and I thought about how these textures are used in work that I've done previously so I've got this image of mine on the left which has shot in a fisherman's shack as part of a location that's separate from the house. So this is, you know, in line with that textured look making use of somewhere that's, very low key and shabby, you know, on goes in line with the whole theme of this fisherman and idea, and you got the image on the right that was shot in this warehouse in l a and it's got all these broken down things around the model, and that really goes well the musty nous of it, the age on dh, but also, you know, the other factors, the fact that their locations so spread out there that the outdoor unknown element of whether I want it to be ideally somewhere indoors. So this is a picture that we first saw on the website off a place called the ruins, which we're going to be shooting it on this picture ready drumming in because this is the outdoor party kind of conservatory part of the ruins where you've got these, we've got tree actually come growing from the inside outwards and was foliage everywhere in spiral staircase. All of these things really appealed to me, and they stood out for me is the place I'm going to shoot in this particular room, but when we had our team producers here go and do iraqi of this location. And when we saw actual pictures off this particular room, it wasn't quite how it looks in this picture, you know, things have bean taken out on it was a lot smaller than we for it wass so it turned out on the logistical actual look of the place it wasn't quite right and that's really important because obviously you can be drawn into think that location looks exactly how it does in the picture and you get an impression, but then we looked at other rooms within the same location because then we thought maybe maybe that room won't work when there may be other rooms will so we saw these pictures on the website on these pictures so these pictures are from the ruins website and so you see these different rooms I immediately saw a lot of chairs and I thought no that's no good cause chairs that just kind of ugly they're not really in my experience they're not really good things to use is part of fashion photos just clunky and they want to get rid of him so my eyes were being drawn to the walls what's on the walls now what's hanging from the ceilings what can really complement the image in the way that might images in my portfolio a complemented by, you know, decor and chandeliers on dh you know, texture and age on all of these things so the bottom right hand picture is the picture that I naturally was drawn to because you have instantly scale that scale that you don't see, at least in the pictures off the other rooms on I knew that scales very important, the more I work with these productions involving models I really like there, dear of the location, being kind of tall and exciting around the model, as you'll see in a lot my pictures as we go on, I also like the color in this room I can see from this picture that there's paintings and murals on the walls and even on the ceilings, which lends itself to the surreal quality that I obviously like in my work and also you've got these chandeliers that look very bright and very grand in the image you've got quite a lot of them in the room was well, and they really crown and framed the room in this particular picture. Now the carpets changed as well, which were pleased about because the carpet for us is like the least interesting part of the way the room looks in this image and also we won't be using all chairs and tables because we knew that they would just get in the way off the fashion element, but everything else we think is a really good foundation and also we got some extra shots off the details in this room. When we went to visit location actually, we've even better than we imagined because you really see these details when you see them when you're busy, when you're physically there, they come across so well, there are other rooms actually more interesting, and they look in the pictures, the other rooms a beautiful as well. This room, though, still has the most scale and scale is something that I increasingly look for when I'm doing grander pictures. I thought about pictures in my portfolio that a relevant to what drew me into that particular room. So you've got this picture here on the left with the canaries, you got the scale of that room that's, a very tall ceilings room where you've got these well, you've got should go, you know, another level and office off the library upon the staircase there staircase became the focal point of this. I've got the room for the stress to spread out on the surreal concept to spread out as well. And also the picture on the right is where I've shot in this room with these mural drawings on the wall, which reminded me off the drawings on the wall in the ruins image, so choosing a stylist and a model, so we also wanted to then think about what we're gonna do in this location, so we thought about this styling that we want to have ideally to really convey the quality that we use in our images so we straight way thought ofthe leonid so leonard we've worked with leading gourevitch ons in new york stylist that we have brought over to do the styling on our workshop so this is a picture of styling that he used on on a shoot of ours last year in new york on dh you can see in this particular case and one of his a couple of these dresses on and his styles and he designs as well and we knew we wanted his quality to be to come through because we can we can trust him we used him a few times now we know that he has this passionate spark where he wants to do everything as best as he can do it on he also has a name pagination that's very in line with our imaginations very kind of over the top color and elegance so we've worked with him before so we knew that he would be great for this. Choosing a model is well is very important especially when you are working with someone who has sees you when you're working with leonid we like to let him input on the model we want him to actually go and choose a model ideally because then he knows that his styling is going to fit the model now these two pictures reason I show these pictures is because is important have a tall model for the kind of cut you addresses that he designs and presents so here's an example of where I didn't get so much of a toll model for a particular dress on you can see how it really pays off to get the model that hold the dress well for could sure in particular, I'm not saying that no tall models for everything but for this particular purpose they worked really well because they become ritually a human hanger for the garment because it's very important to convey the garment very well and you want to make sure that that comes across in the picture so don't talk about lighting now because lighting is the next piece of the puzzle when it comes to how we were putting together the vision for the creative life shoot on what kind of lighting we want to use in the high production element off off the shoot the couture with leonids outfit so, um, lighting is really interesting topic because I've got this whole evolution of how I've gone from my beginnings to what I do now and using more artificial light than I used to use in the beginning. So the beginning I wass very much using natural light this one very much nicely in line with the way that I worked there's no way I would want to even have even been fiddling with lights shooting myself I like to use natural light was very instinctive. I could just jump up and seize it light comes through the window, I could jump up with my auto sayings on my camera, and everything was very simple and natural light went hand in hand with that went really well and it's just something that I think became acosta's, quite organic and whimsical, and also, when I wanted to use lighting in low light situations and also get a bit more creative, I would start reaching out to other sources of light, and these would be things like torches and candles ls and lampposts, and on these often tungsten kind of light, so gave his painterly, orangey quality that I liked. If you're familiar with paintings like by caravaggio, where you've got these dark scenes of the orange glow of light, I really liked that look, I still do, and it still comes through some of my work, but it particularly comes through when you use things like candles and lamps and other improvised sources that for me, were cheap and easy on they wouldn't. They weren't a burden on what was largely instinctive process. Also, I have meddled in haste, tiaras well well, when you take a number of exposures and blend them together to get the best of the shadows on the highlights. So you don't have blow outs and too dark areas where you've shot in very high contrast situations, so this is a good example of that. This is a picture shot in an abandoned girl school, very high contrast situation, a not a situation where I would have liked to take lighting in with me. This is where matthew and I were collaborating a lot because again, it's a context where I wouldn't have wanted to be by myself, and so we go in and we just want to just get down to it really and start shooting and use an available light who set the camera on a tripod it up a few exposures, blend them together, and that allows you instead of using lighting that allows you to basically control with detail in the shadows and the highlights so I could get the detail in the debris at the bottom on the floor and also the detail of the sky in the same shot. So when I started shooting on the models, I would make use of natural light to begin with. I felt most comfortable natural light I started I mean meddled with started playing a flash and stuff, but this mostly in the beginning I was I was in my comfort zone with natural light because it was what I was used to with my self portrait, so these images work fairly well I think with natural light you've got on the top right top left there with a clock you got an image that's shot in a very light every location why I felt like the lighting just worked very good in nam bian manner and you got a picture there of the bottom left there where it's um taken in outdoor situation and the whole of the image this lighting is not directing the eye because you've got an image that's just kind of all out the same very even you've got natural light by a window there of the model in the middle and then you've got on the right hand side another model by a window with the light coming in from the window to camera left on that just gives her a nice glow over the image so not true light has his place and it works very well in situations where you have you know in effect by a window or something where you have no need in particular to draw the eye towards a particular part but then you know once I started playing with artificial light somewhere start with hate you my line to the wise known as continuous or movie lights or spotlights these are very good halfway house between natural light on flash so if you're somebody who once you start kind of getting used to using artificial line and engineering and pointing it in doing things you're not until then used to hate my life so good because you actually turn them on and go and you see, you see what you're shooting with that light and get you used to the idea off pointing and controlling and punching in light situations, but you don't yet have a thing. I don't have the, uh, the obligation to use flash because you can use hate to my in quite creative ways as well. So these images I show here on the left, there you've got an image where you've got hate him. I like behind the model that has made this very fiery hell like look to the image, which I'm going to talk more about the processing and later in the workshop on the image on the right is where I've had a hate to my light to the left and it's pointing in the model is giving a very eerie shadow, no shadows or something we don't always want in our image, but I think it works quite well here because her styling is so kind of gothic and eerie, and the shadow basically reflects on the kind of cruella esque way, and it gives it this movie like quality it's just a bit more hate you, mike, you can see here hate my light pointing use new clocks, lights so these coming hate to my and ladies an image on the left there I've shot this image of one of our shoots with hate him, I sanction eyes good for and like I say, when you get used to the idea of working for lighting and also for creative effect, there are situations where it's just not strong enough and you need something stronger and that's when you think about flash, so flash is something that I have, I think like a lot of photographers that start off of natural life find it difficult to use at first because it's like a whole new world, basically, you know you can you got all this control, you've got all this capability off making a scene on making a picture look so different than it would have bean with natural light and you can do more things as well in terms of the model moving on dh it's a whole new world but it's a scary world because of all the amount of possibility. So a few images where I have used flash on flash has bean fairly well, fairly crucial to the look of the final image. So on the left there you've got a model jumping in the air, which wouldn't have worked without flash because she's frozen in motion, andi gives a nice lick of color to everything as part of that as well got an image in the middle there where you have a split lighting effect of the flash coming in from one side and going across the model to create was kind of contrasting look cross one half of her face and that's in a very dark room, so it gives an effect that wouldn't have bean achieved with natural light. Otherwise they've got an image there where I've little model against the architecture of the house there on dh allows me to keep a detail of the house, and I also have her nicely lit a swell, which I then further eggs saturated in the post production. One of the key images that you're seeing in my workshop is this canary image on this canary image is a bit of a milestone from the in terms of feeling comfortable using flash feeling like I actually didn't want to use natural light because flash gave me something that I couldn't get without it, so and I'll be talking more about that picture later, just to quickly show you a kind of natural light and flash. So I didn't have a lot of time to shoot this picture, as is the case a lot of the time, but I was as soon as I shot the test shoot on the test shot off her sari on the left there. You can see that everything you know you've got light flooding in everywhere on dh that's that would be the way that I would have shot it, you know, some some years ago but as soon as I tried the flashing her, I knew that that was the direction I wanted to go in. So as soon as I showed a picture on the right, I knew that I wanted to keep using flash keep having her pose get the pose I wanted because the flash was directing the eye towards where I wanted it to go and it was lighting her against the background of the library and giving more drama and also allowed her to move as well because I had the dress moved by assistant that kind of pull the dress on the shutter release s o that call it mid motion so the ingredients of fashion the somebody ingredients are going to fashion it's a very high maintenance genre of photography it's an art in itself to bring all of these things together after lunch. We're going to be looking at the test shoot that we did for the shoot tomorrow on the main things that we're looking for in the test shoot, so these ingredients location all the studio obviously in this case location the model, the styling that means the outfit on the hair and the makeup all of that coming together the lighting, the camera lens choice and then afterwards the whole journey off making sense of what you got selection, the post production and the cohesion and cohesion what I mean by that the way you actually presenting your work. So going back to this fine art and fashion thing, what you actually striving for, what you trying to make with your image? Are you trying to make it into a fashion commodity of fine art? Come on, so lighting is one of the main things that we're testing on the test yout lighting is something that we are thinking about. We've brought so much with us because we want to try out, try it out and see what works best in that location so that tomorrow we have more idea what to go to in the limited time we have to shoot the image that we really want to shoot. So when we go into our tests, you were trying to home some of these things in mind, we've got poses, I'm thinking about pose will think I found our lot is that you've got all of these left brain logistical things, you know, the location, the timings, the lighting on all of everything that you've done to get everything in place, and then, you know, the pose is often the last thing you're thinking about, and yet it's so important, because you know, you can have the model, the model just standing there, and you got the perfect lighting, but there's something that's just lacking from the way she's standing on the poses like the final push to get the image that you want in everything that you've bean, you know, engineering for so long, how much of the location to take in a lot of my images of this marriage between portray and location, how do I get the best of both that's? Basically an endless question I'm asking because in my images, the location does play a very important role. It's the context, it's, the story is part of the mood, you know, so you have to know how much of it to get into the shop because we're going straight up to the model that you don't see the location what's the point of being there, the right lighting set up like I've just been saying, actually, making sure that you're using the best of the asked what you brought with you on that show, you don't just use things that are necessary as well, using the strongest combination of what you have and the ideal foundation shot. So you want, teo, I'm talking more about fashion find out, but what I want to get is the ideal fashion foundation, the ideal foundation for possible surreal directions. That I could take it into a fine art on outcome later, the main thing from these to get a good strong fashion image and I also want to give you a glimpse of the lighting diagram as well. Now this is something that we went into planning this is something that we planned at home looking at the pictures of the location, thinking about how the styling is going to look upon discussion, we've landed and the team so we've got here on the subject in the middle of a camera and then we've got the got a big soft box behind the camera we've got a gridded soft box on a boom arm over the model, and a lot of my pictures have used flash going in from a diagnosed direction from the top of the model downwards is something that use, as you saw with the canaries picture is, is the lighting method behind that that's something I like a lot, and we've also got this fill lights of hate, my going in around the situation and also lots of flags. And so these flags there where we were basically blocking out the light so it doesn't spill out from its course in which is pointed, so this looks like a quiet, extravagant lighting set up, but really what we've got there is options, options, the filling in the shadows of off quite a dark room there's no natural light coming into the room unless you there are some dollars you can open to let a little bit in but there's no windows in the actual room itself it was quite dark room which is good because then we have complete control over being able to engineer the lighting as we wish so all of this we're going to be looking at maur when wei come back because I'm going to be talking about our test shoot and how we started to put all these ingredients together the beautiful let's go ahead and take a couple questions if you don't mind, go ahead and ready yourselves out here if you've got any we want to start with one kind of technical from martin and many many others in the chat room we're wondering how do you deal with the copyright issue of using other people's images paintings like in that in that the sea based one in your work how especially when you're doing composites how do you deal with copyright a lot my images used paintings that are hundreds of years old so the copyright there is basically no copyright on those pictures so so yeah though that's great because that only allows me to use them freely because you have this kind of rule over seventy years seventy years after the death of the artists these hundreds of years old so that some of them practically ancient so that leaves me the freedom, so yeah, if you were looking for paintings from modern, you know, people who are more recent than you would we wouldn't be something that you can do because it's, you'd have to get permission from that painter on dh for other sources of images. Then a lot of the time we've it's cleared with the location owner of the place in which we've shot that particular artwork, it is something that is an ancient, sourced elsewhere but sourced from a location so that's kind of in line with our agreement upon renting that location on another times you know, you could even directly collaborate with somebody who actually draws or paints and gives you direct permission. So yeah, it's something that is no one's helping you then permission must be solved without usage, especially if you go onto that want to sell the picture or, you know, license it that would definitely need clearance and that's kind of the follow up question is, do you ever when you're doing your composites go and license from a stock photo or other direct contact images to use in your composites? Very rarely? I mean, sometimes I sometimes I've looked into it it's not something that I've done very often, because usually I use a picture taken myself, which is another answer to the previous question some of the pictures in my compass its are not paintings their actual photos that I've taken myself before like beach scene in the picture of the big red dress so I normally use pictures I shot myself but there's not but I'm certainly my mind is very open to going in sourcing stock from other people and it's something that I would go by on a stock site have you depending on how much I really wanted that picture in as part of my compass it from my questions really related to that almost answered I was wondering if ever you done a shot and then actually felt that you needed to go and shoot something afterwards I know you've used for your archives see and stuff but you've actually felt like you know now I need to go and shoot this thing and then go and do that afterwards um yeah and so in answer that yes e I prefer about the time I find that I'm just using pictures I've only taken because I'm kind of because I think back to them but but then again they may be that I like a picture but I don't feel it and then later I go and shoot something nothing oh, that could work really well in that picture so sometimes it works in that way kind of unintentionally just comes from me not being inspired enoughto take that picture too it's finished and outcome until I then find something else that goes with it there has been a specific time where I did a picture of myself holding a snake years ago matthew and I shot together and we really didn't like the background of me the background that I was standing in so we actually went out and shot a new background it was just another forest background very similar to what you would expect to find in that situation, but it was really good because we managed to get the perfect shot to go with it a shot that allowed for some kind of like depth of field behind me, so it wasn't just kind of up from straight for escape behind me you see that picture on my website my ecology siri's I believe so that picture I didn't like the idea of doing that. First of all, I know I don't like the idea of trying to shoot a picture to fit in with it, but we replicated the settings and we went out to choose somewhere with a similar dappled light that was in the original shot, so we're really keen on matching it and it worked when you were actually in the end it's not something I do a lot, but it's certainly proved to me that it can be tons was good, so I know we're going to be I know we're going to be talking and seeing your left brain partner, matthew tomorrow, matt, tomorrow, more, but a lot of folks were asking about if you don't have a left brain and your right brain, could you talk a little bit about what if you don't have that person that compliment to you when maybe what airways to access the other side of your brain? Your suggestions? Well, it will. It all comes from the whole idea of just reaching out to people, you know, because I talk about matthew, matthew is part of ms aniela, so he's right hand man, but then, there's also people that we use in our repertoire there are people that are additional left brings, you know, they're people like assistance that we've come to know and trust through the years on just people, we've got to know what just friends we met that have become part of our team, and I'm excited to be helping the planning there's also, even when you start to use, you know, stylists and hair and make up these people are their own kind of, well, hair makeup through their particular job. But a stylist in particular, is a person who is actually looking after a whole portion off your chute so that they're not just in the no. Putting the clothes on their also organizing the clothes to arrive there getting another assistant to help them get the clothes they're looking at the mood boards they're working with you so they're more of a they've got this kind of managerial role on your team because subsection of yur team this left brain aspect is really part and parcel of the whole notion of going out and finding people to help you do what you do, which is really nine how fashion works because you can't do everything yourself because you're not really expected to do everything yourself. Andi I certainly would reach out to finding someone maybe maybe the first hurdle might be to find someone who can assist you, someone who can actually maneuver your lighting and even help you have lighting because lighting assistants don't just maneuver, they also suggest and can help you because lighting is a whole art form in itself. When you remember that photography is an art form, lighting is another art form and they both kind of you know that they're two massive things to put together, so having somebody teo import their suggestions on that as well as logistically actually help you with the physical side of it is I think necessary for anyone who's regularly using lighting, so this is yeah, this left brain thing is is a way of thinking is a way of thinking outside of just what you want to do and how people can help you achieve what you want to do and this comes through just reaching out to team members through free shooting through through through making friends through meeting people through networking this all in helps you concentrate on bring your ideas to life bringing your imaginative right brained or hope you want to call it those bringing that creativity to life is having people help you when you're working with a client who has strong ideas about what they want how do you meet in the middle while also maintaining your creative integrity it's a good question uh it all depends on what they want really I mean there's being jobs I've worked on where I mean I'm generally happy doing whatever they want me to do a song that I feel like I'm it's worth my time oh I'm getting something enough from it in terms of the money that they're giving me for it because there's like for example when I talked about the book shoot and doing the images all those images and handing over the role files to them for them to working as they wish I am happy with that in that situation because that's one being paid to do I think I don't know if the final result was something that looked really messy and they just made a complete no mess of something that I created and I didn't think you look good I wouldn't necessarily care because it's just not something that I would showcase to my future clients I would it's not something I would put onto my website for example so as long as I feel like I'm being fairly rewarded for the effort I put into that work and by the way but that's part of another answer to question they all comes down to the brief that you get from them so when they're talking to you you get an idea of how much how much they want your creativity to come into it but important thing with commercial work is that you do actually have a brief it's important you know what they want because a brief will pay at some point even if they say you have loads of freedom in the beginning they do want something in particular because that's how commercial are generally works if there is a lot of room for creative freedom you've gotta understand make sure you understand why that is because if they make it like an advert it's likely that they have a very specific idea of what they want and they might not be able to articulate it and that's a bit dangerous because then you think you've got freedom but then you do something and they say they don't like it so you have to make sure that if you have creative freedom why do you have that freedom what are they expecting from you for example, I've been asked to do commissions where someone gives me an idea for a commission, and I basically have freedom to create that piece because they trusted me as a fine artist, so you have to look at what they expect from you, what you want from it, you know, if it's something where they where they bottle these rules for you, that they want you to abide by, but you feel like it's not worth your time to not be able to bring something into the vision for your own portfolio, then you might decide not to do it. And tio, spend your time doing something that you can. Actually, I have more creativity, all on a cz part of creating it, but I mean, when I create my own work, a lot of the time, I have that freedom because there's no one answering to and I'm happy because the downside of that is there's no one waiting to pay me for it because it's something that I'm doing on my own accord, so sometimes a bit of a trade off between one and the other it's about finding a balance, but ultimately you find that balance through communicating your client carefully and making sure they're happy with all your ideas. Crazy ideas that you might have that you really want to put in your portfolio if they're up for it great, but make sure that they are happy with it so it's all about communication really and weighing up something whether you whether you feel it really worth it for your time and portfolio purposes a question from fashion tv from singapore who was a regular here and has a title great questions as always, this one we do have some detailed questions about location, so when sourcing for our location if you were to pryor prioritized, would you always prefer an ideal location over availability of light or quality of light available over an ideal location? Any practical advice that regard your interesting because like I've been saying about the location we're shooting tomorrow you know, there's the rumor shooting in like ice a little bit of natural light but no windows afraid dark you can see they're all often just you know, she like all yourself and turn the chandeliers often and we're comfortable with that because we like the idea of being able to control that set up but like, for example, the picture of the woman with the canaries one big attraction we have towards that location was the the abundance of natural light in that particular room this very gorgeous gorgeous room where you've got this really high scale spiral staircases, books artifacts from all around the world that became part of the attraction to the room now it really depends on why you're using the location on that particular shoot we were hosting a new event there we were living there for a week, so we wanted it to be an atmospheric location for everyone who was joining us. We also felt that we could be inspired by the natural light as well, but we knew that also we had a lot of light in here that, you know, we weren't necessarily relying on the natural light, so depends whether you really are relying on natural light, which is something that I don't necessarily rely on. A lot of the time I find it's a little bit of a hindrance because it comes into a shot andi actually impede your shot because you're you know you get these patches of natural patches of sunlight which have actually just ruining the image, so it depends on your intentions. It depends where you are in your journey of photography. I certainly have bean very attracted to locations on a lot of my chutes where there is a natural light because we know that other photographers who are joining us on that shoot as well would like it, so yeah, I think natural light is part ofthe the atmosphere to being there which can inspire you, but it's not always a technical issue it might be that you want to shoot with flashing. You want to literally flag out all the natural light anyway, so very much down to decisions that you make for each case.