TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Tyler’s Tips. Today I’m going to talk about why it’s so important to work it. Okay, so what do I mean when I say work it? I’m talking about the importance of pushing a little bit more to get a little bit more out of every shoot. I’ll tell you a quick story. I was driving back from a recent commercial shoot with an assistant of mine and as I often do, I asked her, “Hey, what’d you think of that shoot? What went well? What could we have done better?” She had some great feedback and one interesting thing came out of this conversation I want to share with you. She noticed, which I think was really important and insightful that towards the end of the shoot, the people we were working with were starting to get tired. In this case it was an architectural shoot and we had a lot of staff from the architectural firm who were in the photos as our talent effectively, which we often do on those shoots.

She mentioned, “They’re really getting tired. They were getting tired and it was starting to impact the photos a little bit and I could see they were starting to get a little bit annoyed.” I totally agreed with her. She was spot on with that. Yet, I pushed back in that conversation and I said, “You’re right and I’m glad we didn’t stop. I’m glad we pushed on. They were probably a little annoyed that it went longer than they would have liked, but nobody got angry. Nobody got upset. But we kept working it and as a result, I think one of the last shots we got was actually one of the best.” So using that story as an example, I encourage you to not give up and that there are a lot of external factors when we’re shooting that encourage us to stop. Sometimes it’s just there’s a lot of logistics. The people we’re working with get tired, those kinds of things. Sometimes we get tired. Sometimes we just think we got it, “Oh dude, nailed it. Done.”

When you get back to the studio and you’re reviewing those images, a lot of times you didn’t nail it or at least I didn’t nail it in that situation or I feel like I didn’t. So I’ve learned over the years how important it is to just extract everything we can from a photo shoot. A lot of times these are once, maybe once in a lifetime is kind of overstating it, but they are singular opportunities. We’re not going to have that person and that environment and that light again, and let’s get the best we possibly can out of it. Let’s keep working it. So Tyler’s Tip for today. I hope that was useful and as always, thank you for your time. If you have any ideas or questions you’d like me to talk about in a future episode, just drop me a line and I’ll work it in. Until next time.