The Project

I can’t remember what my original quantity thought was, but it quickly formed into 50 shoots with fifty ladies in fifty locations. And though each model was only paid a modest shoot fee, multiplying it by fifty, it quickly became an overall substantial cost.

In reality there were three additional shoots as three of the original shoots had to be discarded as their images produced nothing that could be used.

Beyond the cash element, there was the shoot time, travel time, and image selection time, which upon review averages to about 6 hours per shoot. This translates then into 318 man-hours.

Another element that creeped into the overall project management and cost, was the number of no-shows. I was stood up 8 times over the course of the project, which not only impacted the schedule but added a further 18 hours of lost time to the timeline.

The weather introduced three shoot reschedules but didn’t increase the number of manhours. Several times, the unexpectedly cold weather of early-morning winter starts affected the nature of what could be shot, as getting the model comfortable in being able to remove layers of clothing proved impossible and shots were compromised.

We also had two abandoned shoots that were only partially completed. One because of a knife-wielding homeless dude, and the second by a peeping tom on a bicycle who kept following us and refused to give us privacy. Those shoots were shrunk to 20 and 30 minutes but I was still fortunate enough to have a shot from each that was suitable.

There were several instances of having to relocate a shoot due to a location problem. We had issues with parking lot security people. We had a tattoo convention taking place at our chosen venue. And on three occasions we had extreme traffic issues (people and cars).

While in theory that would appear to render 100 dates available in a calendar year, it was then a matter of reconciling those dates with model availability. And don’t discard the fact that this was very much a one-man operation on my end, so my own availability had to be added into the mix. In reality, this dropped the actual number of shoots in a given year to about twenty.

But it was also very much a learning process and by making some changes to the way and nature of what I shoot, I could tackle it again in less than a year, I believe. Such is the learning process, I guess.