Don't sweat the details (too much)

I had a session the other day...seemed to take forever to nail down a date, as it came up just as my wife and I (mostly her) were about to have a baby. Hard to schedule something when you could be racing to the hospital at any minute...

The concept was "china doll discarded in the attic", and it was my understanding that I was shooting one model. She was coming with an escort, which I encouraged since coming over to a house of a man you've never met to go up into his creepy old attic could be a little, uh, nerve-wracking. I was expecting two people. So when the car pulled up with four occupants (which, unless I missed my guess was the model's boyfriend, the model's friend, and the model's friend's boyfriend) I was a little aprehensive.

Then, just before my model went to change, she informed me that her friend would be in the shoot also. Uh oh. I just spent 45 minutes setting lights for a one-model shoot.

I decided to roll with it and just see what happened. It's a good thing I did. Because the snafus didn't end there. The models were doing their own makeup, and their concept of "we have the right makeup to make ourselves look like porcelain" was different than mine. I reminded myself to just roll with it, or as Joe McNally recently put it "uh, remember you already said yes".

So they ended up looking less like china dolls and more like Victorian-era young women, which made being in my (freezing cold) attic make a little less sense, but a quick redirect of the lights, a quick stopping down of the aperture to get rid of some of the attic junk, and the shoot turned out just fine. Turned out quite well, actually.