When Photoshoots Don’t Go As Planned

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Thankfully no mice were involved in this photoshoot but my original plan for it did indeed go awry. Usually I wouldn’t mention it, let alone blog about it- but I think there’s value in being honest about the behind the scenes reality of what I do. So much social media and life-on-the-internet is about carefully curating versions of reality. Life is imperfect, life is messy- and pretending those parts of creative work don’t exist isn’t doing anyone any favors. And it isn’t honest.

So here’s how a shoot went a bit off the rails and how we brought it back to create something visually interesting and unique!

When I set up this shoot with Giggles I had intended to do this elaborate makeup style I’d been wanting to try out for ages, full face paint and lots of coordinating accessories. I sketched ideas, I plotted, I prepped my makeup kit. An hour later we had an approximate of the makeup I had in mind complete and it looked fine in person. But as soon as I began shooting it……well, it looked –bad.

It didn’t photograph well, in some light it looked almost comical and definitely not how I imagined it. It was Not Working. My heart sunk (I always worry about wasting anyone’s time on shoots) as I knew we’d have to wash it off and begin again. But Giggles is amazing and patient and we washed off the blue face paint and started over, leaving some violet shades around her eyes from the original makeup. The entire shoot took longer than we intended for a weeknight but I’m far happier with the results and didn’t just give up and not finish a shoot that night.