My 6-month Report Card
It's time for a self-evaluation: How am I doing?
The school year is finally winding down for most students and teachers, so this seems like an appropriate time to give myself a performance review, including the industry standard What Went Well and Even Better If analysis. It’s also been nearly six months since I did my first paid model shoot, a nice round number and an appropriate passage of time for a proper retro/introspection.
By the numbers, here’s how my first six months of shooting have panned out:
17 paid model shoots
14 different models (3 of whom I worked with twice) from 7 different countries
A shoot on average once every 9 days
4 rolls of 35mm film (Kodak Portra 400 and 800)
One trip abroad (Thailand) to shoot multiple sessions
One high-five from a model (thanks @aagrus)
Zero regrets (ok maybe that Thailand trip - five models in five days was a lot)
My experiences doing this have been overwhelmingly positive. There has been nary a moment that could be called a disaster and vanishingly few hiccups along the way. On the whole, the models have been fun and easy to work with, things have gone as planned, and I’ve been happy with the results.
If I had to pick out a high and a low moment from all of my shoots, I’d actually highlight my first and second shoots to represent those extremes more than any of the others. My first shoot, in retrospect, was probably the worst one I’ve done. Well obviously, I hear you saying, the first one was always going to be the worst one. That’s true, and my lack of experience certainly played into it, but it was markedly different in a few ways, all of which contributed to it not going too well. I had no idea, for example, if the model would be able to pose herself without assistance (my inexperience rearing its head, to be sure), so I directed the entire shoot by showing her photos on my phone and having her approximate the poses. To be clear, this isn’t inherently a bad way to run a shoot, but it does require some careful attention and a high level of communication, which is not my strong suit. Most (all?) of the models I’ve worked with have spoken English as their second (or third, fourth…) language, so it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how easy it’ll be to talk. This shoot was one of the trickier ones, a combination of her English and my nervousness and inexperience. I also didn’t have a neutral gray card to fix my white balance, so I had to do a lot more work in post to get the colors to look right. The model also wanted more skin retouching on the final images than I thought was necessary, and I had to censor her images in my portfolio. Oh, and she was twice as expensive as any model I’ve shot since (on top of me booking a studio for the shoot).
Juxtapose that experience with my second shoot, which couldn’t have gone better. I don’t want to oversell the negative experience of my first shoot, because in the moment I had nothing to compare it to and wasn’t all that dissatisfied with how it went. Then I worked with @ana_po_mdmodel, and everything clicked. I didn’t try to run the shoot from images on my phone, if only because we were shooting in her hotel room, which I couldn’t see ahead of time, so I just let her do most of the work. She was very relaxed and chatty, so much so that we spent as much time talking about this/that/the other thing as we did shooting. She also had encouraging and helpful things to say about this new business venture, all of which left me feeling pretty great about everything when we were finished. I’m not going to say that I would have given up if the second shoot had gone more or less the same as the first one. Having a better experience so quickly, though, gave me a lot of confidence that I could actually do this.
Right, so let’s do a quick What Went Well and Even Better If.
What Went Well?
Shooting time: I feel like I’ve pretty much maxed out on how much shooting I could reasonably be expected to do, given that I’m limited to doing this stuff on weekends while I still have a full-time job. It’s been a lot, but having a big library of content made launching the Substack site less stressful.
Consistency: While I haven’t adhered to my predetermined posting schedule to the day exactly, I’ve kept to posting an alternating prose and photo article every week since I started. (This is only post #5, but so far so good.)
Interactions with models: I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how easily I’ve worked with models from all over the world. The fact that some of them have connected me with other model friends of theirs and have agreed to work with me multiple times says a lot about the positive experiences they’re having.
Confidence: I feel like I know what I’m doing now in the most basic sense, which makes me less nervous in the leadup to each shoot and helps me to concentrate on finding the best light and using the space creatively. I can tell that I’ve already grown considerably in this regard.
Even Better If?
Posing models: While it’s true that professional models are perfectly capable of posing themselves, this is still a skill I need to develop much further, especially if I hope to work with amateur models for this website. The pros even ask for guidance sometimes, and I don’t always have a clear answer based on what I’m seeing, so this is absolutely still a weak spot.
Social Media and Self-Promotion: I’m terrible at self-promotion, which does not bode well for starting a small business based on growing an audience of subscribers. I’m getting better at using IG to post more frequent content, like model shoots while they’re happening, but I’m surely not using social media as well as I need to.
Creativity: I tend to rely on the workflow of showing up at the venue with the same photo gear and just letting the model dictate the rhythm and the poses, so I don’t have as much of a stamp on the final product as I’d like. I need to have some more specific and unique ideas for individual shoots to differentiate them and add some variety to my content.
In the end, then, I think I’ll give myself a B- for my performance so far. A reasonably strong performance with ample opportunity for growth.
As always, thank you for coming along for the ride, and do spread the word if you know others who would be interested in my newsletter. (See? That’s about all I can muster for self-promotion. Pathetic!)