Five Tips For Your First Commission
Posted on 20 Jun 2011 | by Ben | Filed under Blog
I remember going into my first paid assignment with a mix of excitement and nervousness. I came out the other end a far better photographer for the experience. Here are five tips I think that will make your first commission a little easier on the nerves.
1. GET A FORMAL BRIEF
Make sure you are 100% confident about what your client wants. You’d be surprised how often you think you know what they want when in fact that may not be the case. Request a written brief to get all of the specific job and technical details, however I personally find a visual brief the most useful. Get the client to send through examples of the style of images they are seeking along with a sentence on what it is they like about each image. This is a great resource to have on the job with to sense check your work against.
2. PLAN AND PLAN AGAIN
Planning is your best friend. The more effort you put in before the shoot the easier your job on the ground will be. Start by creating a shot list. What are the must have shots to make the job a success? Given my speciality is travel editorial, I typically work in unison with the writer. If I can’t get access to the story beforehand, I make sure we both know what each other is doing to ensure a well synced article.
Once you have a shot list, sequentially lay it out along with all the variables. Where are the possible locations for each scene? How long will you need in each location? How much travel time do you need between each shot? When is sunrise and sunset? When is high tide? When is low tide? What is the best time of day to be in each place?
By meticulously planning these things you’ll have a far greater chance of success and a strong grasp of the size of the job at hand. It will also focus your attention as once you hit the ground you’ll be amazed at how quickly the time and opportunities fly by. Planning is your friend.
3. WHAT’S YOUR PLAN B?
Regardless of how much planning you do, when you get on the ground something will go wrong. For me, this is usually the weather. There’s nothing worse than arriving on location to find your vision of blue skies and lush fields are replaced with thunder clouds and muddy bogs.
If you have planned for the unexpected then you can usually get through with surprisingly good results.
Get in touch with someone on the ground while you are planning to inform you on current conditions and the expected forecast. Is your deadline flexible? Can you work in a couple of weather days? If not, plan for how you will cope. Think about how you can still tell your story despite the unexpected.
On a shoot last year I was greeted with an entire week of rain. But because I had researched the terrain of the area and had planned for the unexpected, I kept my shots tight and within the forest canopy, taking advantage of the beautiful greens the rain created. The end results were great and the client thought so too.
4. PROCESS ON THE ROAD
If you’re on a multi day shoot, I always find that it saves time to process your RAW images every evening. Yes it makes for a very long day but for me it is a lot faster while the shots are still in my mind and it allows me to assess my work in detail while there is still time to make changes if I think they are required. Plus there is nothing worse than arriving home with thousands of images to process in one go.
I also like to send sample shots through each day to my client. I find this provides confidence in the client that they will receive the results they need, but it also gives them an opportunity to provide feedback on the fly while there is still time for me to make adjustments on the shoot.
5. THE CLIENT WILL CHOOSE UNEXPECTED IMAGES
I have been surprised by the client’s image selection for every commission I have done. If you are prepared for this then you won’t be disappointed with the finished product. My suggestion would be to keep this in mind when supplying your selects to the client and only send them images you would be 100% happy to see in print. It sounds silly but it’s very easy to send more images than the client needs, who will inevitably choose an image that you wouldn’t typically submit if your editing was stricter.
And finally, enjoy yourself!
