This week, I decided to setup a last minute yoga shoot. I found out that I would be able to use a local yoga studios space to photograph in, and started trying to round up a person to shoot with. The lovely Lucinda, who you see above, jumped on board and we were ready to roll. The only problem was, the day of the shoot it turns out that no one can come let us into the yoga studio. Now I’ve got a pretty model, an assistant, my camera bag, and a truck filled with studio lighting equipment… and no access to electricity. Times like this always make my head go straight to “Crap. I’m gonna get nothing.” And I think that’s every serious photographer’s secret fear: coming home empty handed. Luckily my thoughts never linger there for long, and quickly shift into figuring out how to make it work, as was taught to me by an important mentor.
You see, long before Larry the Cable Guy was saying “Git ‘er done”, I was working in an auto body shop owned by a guy named Toddio. Now, I could make a whole new blog just about all the valuable things I learned from Toddio. But the thing that has proved the most valuable to me that was the answer to just about every problem I came to him with: “Make it work!” Hey, this new fender doesn’t fit. “Make it work.” Hey, I can’t get this panel straight. “Make it work.” Hey, this bumper is stuck on. “Make it work.” Every time I had a problem that I thought I couldn’t get around, the answer always came back the same. “Make it work.”
It’s not that that Toddio wanted me to make up my own methods, or that he was uninterested in showing me the right way to do things. Sometimes there is no ‘right way’ to do things, or perhaps the ‘right way’ just happens to be exactly what isn’t working right now. It’s just that as the saying goes, “The best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry”. Translation: Being well prepared and knowing the ‘right way’ is great and worthy goal, but things just tend not to work out the way they were supposed to. Toddio wasn’t interested in what the problem was, he was only interested in the solution. He was in the business of fixing cars, not just identifying problems.
As a professional photographer, I’ve found that mindset to be invaluable. It does no good to just point out what the problem is or what won’t work, unless you plan on figuring out what you can do about it. When working on cars, it’s not an option for it to just not work. Someone needs their car back. Likewise, when someone is depending on you to get the shot, or even when there’s just a shot that you really want to capture, things frequently go wrong. And you can either come home with nothing, or you can make it work. Being a professional is about learning how to make it work.
So what did I do the other day? I figured that if I wanted to save the shoot from the scrapyard, I would just have to find an outdoor location nearby and just stick with using reflectors and the light that God made. So that’s what we did. There wasn’t much in the area of beautiful scenery around, and we didn’t really have time to go to a new location entirely, so thin focus, tight crops and long focal lengths were the order of the day. The shot at the top is just a yellow tree that looked really beautiful against the blue sky. Grabbing my my Pentax K-7 and a 50-135mm f/2.8, I knew that if I laid on the ground in the middle of the road, I could get her up in there with the tree blurred out, and it would look pretty nice. The rest of the shots were taken a few hundred feet from there in a very little patch of pretty greenery. I was predominantly using my Pentax 200mm f/2.8 and 300mm f/4 prime lenses, which I both love. But I loved them a little extra that day, since the long focal lengths and nice bokeh really helped with only letting what I wanted into the photos and keeping everything else out, and yielded the rest of these photos.
In whatever you do, don’t focus on what won’t work, what can’t be done or what the problems are. If there’s something you want to get done, find a way to make it work.
Very good lesson…Toddio was a wise man! And you’re right, photography is all about making it work, even when it shouldn’t. There is often no recipe for success, and you make some great calls with this shoot. Kudos, they came out terrific!
Nice Pics- even greater perspective. It was a great reminder that perfection has to be reconciled to reality or things don’t get done. I needed that. Thank you.
I found your blog through the Teva Mountain Games page. I am a Teva rep in Texas.
Thanks, guys! Toddio was indeed a wise man. For a blue-collar, chain smoking, drink during work, Harley-riding old guy, he sure taught me more about life than anyone else I know.