Planning the session

Most rope shoots are planned in exactly one dimension. Somebody thinks about the light, somebody thinks about the arrangements, and the sequence of the day is left to work itself out. It does not work itself out, and the cost lands on the pictures.

Plan the order, not just the content

The frames that hold up are nearly always taken early. This is not a superstition and it has nothing to do with inspiration. A body that has been in position for two hours carries the fact in the face and the shoulders, viewers detect it without being able to name it, and no amount of care afterwards removes it. That mechanism is described at length in three authors, one image.

The obvious implication is usually ignored. If early frames are better, the most important image should be attempted first, not built up to.

The instinct runs the other way. Crews warm up with easy shots, save the ambitious one for when everybody has hit their stride, and take it two hours in with a tired model. The ambitious shot then fails for reasons nobody attributes to the schedule.

Inverting the order feels wrong for about one session and then feels obvious. Set up for the picture that matters, take it while everything is fresh, and treat everything afterwards as a bonus.

A short list beats a long one

Write down the images you actually want, one line each, in priority order. Three or four is a session. Ten is a fantasy, and a fantasy has a specific bad effect: the crew hurries the early frames in order to get through the list, which sacrifices the exact part of the day that was worth having.

Each line should say what the picture is about rather than what the arrangement is. A picture about weight going onto one hip. A picture that ends on a hand. A detail of fibre crossing cloth. Described that way, the list stays useful when the room turns out to be smaller than expected or the arrangement does not work, because the intention survives the change of plan.

Attach the practical constraint to each line while you are at it. Which of these needs three metres of working distance for a longer lens, which needs a clear ground plane, which needs the light moved. Discovering the incompatibilities on paper takes ten minutes. Discovering them in the room costs half the session. The constraints themselves are the subject of lens, distance and the shape of a body.

Decide who leads, and when it changes

Three people directing at once is the most common source of low grade friction on a set, and it is entirely avoidable by naming the handover.

While an arrangement is being built, the rigger leads. The photographer’s requests go through them rather than directly to the model, because a person being asked to move by two people has to decide which one to listen to while holding a position.

Once the camera is up, the photographer leads, and the rigger stops adjusting unless asked. Small unrequested improvements between frames are the reason a promising sequence turns into thirty slightly different pictures with no best one.

The model leads over both at any moment, without discussion and without needing a reason. This has to be said explicitly before the session rather than assumed, because the assumption is not always shared and the moment it is tested is the worst moment to discover that.

Build the frame before anyone is in it

Everything that can be prepared without a person should be prepared without a person. Clear the background, set and test the light on a stand-in or a chair, check the working distance, decide the camera height, take a frame of the empty scene and look at it properly.

This is not fussiness, it is arithmetic. Every minute of setup that happens while somebody is in position is a minute of that person’s finite good condition spent on something that did not need them there. Crews who move the setup work to the front routinely get twice as much out of the same total time.

The empty frame test is the single most useful habit in this list, and the reason it works is simple: the eye edits a room automatically and the camera does not.

Blocks and breaks, scheduled in advance

Plan the session as short working blocks with breaks between them, and put the breaks in the plan rather than calling them when someone looks like they need one.

Scheduled breaks are easier to take. A model deep in a session may not want to interrupt something that appears to be going well, and a break that arrives because it was always going to arrive requires nobody to ask for it. This is the difference between a break as a concession and a break as part of the method.

They also improve the work directly. A break is when the photographer looks at what has actually been captured rather than continuing on assumption, and when the crew notices that the thing they have been chasing for twenty minutes is not going to happen.

Settle the terms before the day

Some decisions must not be made on the day, and they are all the ones about where the pictures go.

What the images are for. Which platforms and publications are agreed and which are excluded. Whether a face will be identifiable. Who has approval over the selection and whether approval means a veto. What happens if somebody changes their mind later.

The reason these belong in the planning conversation is timing. Every question left open surfaces later, usually at the point when the model is tired, partly restrained and least placed to negotiate anything. Settled in advance they take fifteen minutes and never come up again. How the answers get recorded and attributed afterwards is the subject of credit, and who gets named.

What a plan is for

Not to make the session mechanical. A plan is what allows the session to be improvised safely, because the crew knows what the priorities are and can therefore abandon them intelligently when something better turns up.

Sessions with no plan are not more spontaneous. They are slower, they run longer, and they spend their best hour discovering things that could have been written down the week before.