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Pre-Pro Planning

In this episode, I wanna talk about pre-production planning. I do have this kind of scrappy, run and gun style but there truly is a method to the madness and it all happens here. I wanna walk through how I plan beforehand to be better prepared before I go out to shoot. How I find locations, how I generate inspiration and ideas and how to integrate the client product within that. And to cap it off, we'll talk a little bit about my style and how I want to integrate that client product within my own photography style. So, probably the most important part is choosing your location. Right now, it's October in Washington, which means it's on the cusp of winter and in that, that means snow is starting to settle in in the mountains, so that's pretty much a no go. There'd have to be a lot of planning and a lot of details that go into making that happen, that we just don't need to get into, so, I think the beach, the Washington coast would be the best option for this time. The general idea of th...

e shoot was illustrated in that PDF doc. The location was Washington and I wanted to integrate the client product within my style and the location, those ideas, and all that was shared right in that trip specific PDF I sent to them. One thing to keep in mind too, is these are day packs, so it'd be silly to set up a camping scene, cuz they're not hiking in with these tiny packs with a tent. So I don't need to go into planning some camp scene. Just be logical, know your foundations and plan your location and how you're gonna execute that from there. So, I'm gonna open up Pinterest here and show you how I generate some ideas and inspo for the shoot. So I've already went ahead and made the board quite a few months ago but this is what it looks like. So, as you scroll through the board, you can see it's pretty consistent imagery. It's all based around the beach. There's some of my images that I referenced in there as well, just to build a good inspo board. If you've never used Pinterest, it's really simple and the best place to make boards. So, if I come up here and I type a search in, and I say, ocean hiking, right there you see some photos of ocean hiking, and, you know, I like this one right here and let's say I wanna save that to the board. So I say, save and I'm going to save it to the Pa'lante shoot board, boom. And you click in and it's right there at the very top. So as you populate your board and you get all your ideas and inspo there, at the very bottom, there's this find some ideas for this board, so you can click on that and for the most part, it's gonna be very fitting to what was on the board and if you back up to the main sheet, you see there's more studio focused stuff of this dude laughing and some black and white images that aren't as beachy but it is highlighting the mood I want. So, you're gonna see certain ideas in here that are more focused in studio and not so focused on like the beach hiking thing and that's how good Pinterest is, it finds those very similar images to what you're saving on your board. Yeah, and there's a bunch of really solid imagery here that could totally be on that board. So we're back at the board and let's say there's an idea I really, really like, and I want to find images more specific to that idea. Let's go with this one here, and as you scroll down, you see quite a lot of similar images in that like, this looks like it's shot on film, or I think it said it was shot on a 5D Classic and you see all these images that look like they were shot on an older camera. It's insane how accurate Pinterest is when they find and populate other ideas. And as you find ideas, you like, maybe this one, you can just save it right to your board, and again, populates at the top, which further curates the board and the similar ideas you can find within Pinterest. So I like to have this for myself as a reference and also for the client to show them, "Hey, this is a general idea of what I'm thinking." It's a great thing to have to stay on track as you keep planning out your shoot. And as Pinterest is a great source of inspiration and a good way to get the ideas flowing, (object rustles) I think it's really important to come up with your own and draw them out. So, they're very scrappy, they're very not good, but I like to draw out my images. So this is, frame by frame, ideas with descriptions right below them. I am just not good at drawing but the point for this is to just get my ideas on paper so I don't have to like think about them or remember them later. I can just refer to this and they're there. This is from an older shoot but I had this idea of my friend Bree against the car door. I had an idea of her in the tent and, I mean, you can see the beautiful tent drawing right there. That's the edge of the tent, or at least supposed to be and there was this stump and I wanted them chilling there with their dog on the side of the stump and the last shot is a more wider casing shot that is just focused on the scene as a whole. So, under each drawing is a little description of it. Sometimes I list like even specifics like 35 millimeter focal length, or "Hey, instead of this option, maybe also try this with that scene." It's pretty straightforward. It doesn't have to be pretty. Another thing I'll usually do is, below it, or on the side, I'll write a props list. So for this shoot, I wanna do like a film camera, some snacks, we'll obviously have the backpacks and the jackets. I like to do all that just for organizational purposes. Just one less thing to think about and one less thing to remember later on. Recently I picked up an iPad and I used to journal in this, (object thuds) but I decided to upgrade my quality of art and my drawings and do it on here. A few weeks ago, I went to the location we're shooting. You can see landscape photos of the location, but I'm not there to shoot landscapes, I'm there to shoot subjects experiencing the landscape. So I wanted to find little nooks, little places I could shoot subjects in for myself. I took some sample photos with the idea of shooting subjects within them as I was there. These are all just on my 5D Mark IV, and then, I took the time to take them in Procreate and do some beautiful stick figure drawings. Again, the quality of this is not important, it's just getting your ideas on paper. So, you'll see the first one is a river shot, there's someone jumping over the river with the backpack on. I didn't draw the jacket, I'm not that talented, but it gets the idea across, it gets the point there and I wrote a little bit of text at the top, just explaining what I was trying to get. So all those images you just saw, as you scroll through you see 'em here, with my stick figures drawn in and a little bit of text, descriptions, ideas. They're just there to get the point across, to further organize yourself for when the shoot actually happens. Again, it's just one less thing to think about, it's one less thing to try to remember. It's simply a guideline. And I think it's really important to share these, like, even if it's not beautiful artwork, it gets the point across that, "Hey, these are my photos and these are my ideas." The Pinterest board you're sharing is a curated collection of not your photos, usually, it's photos and inspiration you're drawing from the internet and when you show them this, this is your work. And as scrappy as it may be, it's still your work. You're getting your point across and you're telling the client, "Hey, I came up with these ideas and this is what I wanna execute for you." As you're drawing out these shots and as you're planning, I think it's important to think about the brand and the client and integrating that within your own photography style. One of the biggest questions I get asked a lot is how I go about my composition, and to be honest, until I started thinking about it, I really didn't know what I was doing with it. But now as I started actually thinking about it, I've seen small little things that subconsciously go through my mind that I've now been able to put on paper and share with you guys. The rule of odds is simply having an odd number of subjects. So, instead of two or four or six, having a one, three, five, all that. I usually try to keep it under five, for instance, if I'm shooting subjects, like I don't want seven people running around like it just is too much at that point. I chose three people for this shoot specifically to cater to the rule of odds. With the rule of odds, think about it, you have a defined middle, so, one person, one person, one person. There's something about human nature that just likes that composition, that likes having that defined middle element. It's a weird thing to explain, but it makes sense and I see it throughout my images constantly, the one, three or five rule. One thing I cater toward two is center framing. Very rarely am I spacing something off to the third or spacing something off low or high. Most of the time, my subject is directly in center framing. Sometimes I break that rule but like I said, most of the time. I think the biggest thing that defines how I think about composition is I think about my image with page margins, essentially. You know when you're in Microsoft Word and you have that like inch space between both sides? That's what I'm thinking. A lot of times I'll be shooting live view with that rule of thirds grid on my live view screen. So, if my subjects are center frame, I'm gonna use those lines for margins, so the subject on the left and the subject on the right are gonna peak just outside those lines or within those lines, however, it's being framed within equal margins. And same goes for the edges of the images, it's like page margins on a doc. I want an even amount of space to really dial in that composition, so if the subject is here, I want this much space at the top and the same exact amount at the bottom. And even if I'm shooting a subject or a feature or something, I'll even balance out the objects that are in my foreground to better suit that composition. And that pretty much sums up what I do for pre-production. I use it as a roadmap, I use it as a guideline, so when I show up, it's gonna be there when I need it, it's gonna be something consistent, but I kind of live by this rule of 40 to 60% planning things and allowing room for spontaneity. This is exactly what pre-production allows, is that room to just be inspired by what's in front of you by having a general direction and a framework to work within, so, and that wraps up the pre-production section. Let's go out and shoot.