What am I trying to say here? Perfect practice makes perfect, or more realistically good practice makes good. When I attempted to do my Places & Spaces project I shot over 30 people in a 35-week span. I thought I was killing it, I blogged about my mistakes, and I tried to implement whatever I learned in my next session. Yes, I got better, drastically, but I limited myself to only correcting one mistake each session.

If I noticed that I didn't communicate enough in week 7, then in week 8 you wouldn't be able to shut me up. I was making changes, but all the while I was practicing bad habits. Surely in week 7 there was more that could be fixed than my communications skills. These bad habits stuck with me and eventually became had to break. Till this day, I still do things like move to the next location without making sure I got the perfect shot in that space. I often focus too much on the hands and forget about the expression or even worse if I feel like I'm giving my model too many directions I'll just settle on whatever she gives me to avoid being annoying... This usually results in a lackluster shot.

So how do you fix that?

Practice With Someone You're Comfortable With

Here's a secret, no one I've shot is an actual model... I mean technically they are, because their modeling, but the majority aren't actually pursuing a modeling career. For the most part, each person I've shot I've never met, some of us have become associates over time, but initially I was just as nervous as they were.

I first learned this in week 4 when I shot Imani. There was nothing to worry about, I was at ease with her, if I fucked up, we laughed about it, if she sucked I could direct her over and over again without her getting annoyed. At the time of our first shoot I was trying to prove to her and the rest of the world that I was the real deal, so I didn't necessarily take advantage of friendship, I was trying to be cool... I didn't talk much, I just shot and regardless of the shots outcome I just pretended as if they were perfect... I made sure to not make this mistake the second time.

This time, I understood that I wasn't this grand portrait photographer, I went over all my shoots and noticed that I had so much to work on, most notably, expressions and hand placement. So instead of telling Imani we were going to do this bad as shoot, I told her that we were going to work on some of my weaknesses. Being on the same page really helped me.