I’m going to level with you, I planned a lot of outdoor practice sessions for this past Saturday and if you live in Maryland then you know it was cold. Like stupidly cold. And rather than let common sense step in I let stubbornness to the plan win, until we got to Downs Park and I realized it was even colder just off the water. So, this set turned into another “what not to do in photography” post which thankfully does not take long at all to photograph. We were there for a good 10 minutes, tops.
First, the weather. While you can take photos with jackets and coats on and they can still look great, even that has a threshold. A good rule of thumb; if yesterday’s snow has turned into today’s solid sheet of ice then you really need to change what sort of photography you are attempting. It might be better suited for a nature shoot that day. As you can see in the first photo on the bench, even if you use the converting it to grayscale trick you can still see that windchill expression on my subject’s faces. No one wins in this scenario. So, if you step outside on the snow and you slide rather than crunch and that’s followed up by the windchill biting your face off then it’s time to try something else.
Next up are the photos leaning, this is a two for one deal. In the first photo, my subject has her eyes closed. This is because I had her facing the sunlight. The problem is that puts the light in her eyes which makes every photo either eyes closed or eyes squinting. The way to deal with this is to either move parallel with the sun, away from the sun, or in the shade somewhere. However, keep in mind you need to be sure you have enough shade covering what you are trying to do otherwise you will have two competing exposures which either means lots of processing time or a photo you know you could have done better with. The solution for the shade photo would have been to ask my subject to move back one or two poles back to be covered in more shade.
Finally, the one with the puddle. Disregarding the fact that I made no effort to consider pretty much any of the background (that was point, I just rushed in because I knew if I thought about it I’d work these issues out), notice that light pole growing out of her head. This sort of problem is extremely easy to fix on site – just move yourself left or right and that pole is gone. Otherwise, you might find yourself spending minutes to hours trying to get it “just right” in your processing tools. Again, processing tools are great and can accomplish amazing things, but your goal should be to spend as little time on them as possible because it’s faster and easier to just fix things on site.
Again, notice that two of these three problems could have been fixed on site. A few minutes considering what you are working towards during the session can save you time later and even help you over deliver in your results (I am a big proponent of over delivering – everyone wins when that happens).