yesterday was an insanely packed day, with an engagement shoot at brooklyn botanic garden in the morning and a six-outfit editorial shoot in the evening. all in all, i was taking photos for about six hours yesterday and in transit for three and a half. my back is killing me because i brought a super full kit to make sure i was ready for anything at both shoots, and i am glad i did but also not glad i did because damn. back pain is real. on the other hand, it was good training for the many weeks of backpack travel ahead this summer. so i guess it’s a win from that perspective.

the photos from both the morning and evening came out awesome and the clients were super happy. but yesterday proved to me that i have a long row to hoe when it comes to building up my ability to manage simultaneous execution of photo and video while i’m out working. in the morning, thankfully i had nigel with me, so he handled a lot of the filming for me. going through that footage will definitely be interesting. in the evening, i intended to shoot a lot more content than o did. actually, let me walk that back a bit. there are a few key segments i didn’t record that i wish i would have. i needed to record us meeting, us talking about the clothes she wanted to shoot. and then a little bit of material of her prepping for b roll.

what i did was set up the gopro on a tripod and recorded the process of shooting a couple of the outfits. there were a couple of time lapses that will definitely look cool and be fun to share individually, but they’re not really inspired or engaging content. i am taking this as a learning experience. my execution was way off, and the reason was that i didn’t go in with a solid plan; i didn’t contemplate in advance what my specific plan of attack would be, and while i had a vague idea of what i’d like to produce, that isn’t good enough. if my entire focus was on video, i might be able to pull that off. but since my primary creative drive needs to be focused on photo, i have to make sure i have a clear vision of exactly what video and audio i will need to bring my video to life.