Five Tips for a Successful Photoshoot

A successful photoshoot takes the confluence of a wide range of factors and planning, and doing everything you can to prepare ahead of time increases your chances of creating the images you want. This excellent video discusses five helpful tips for ensuring your next shoot is successful.

Coming to you from James Quantz Jr, this great video details five tips for making next photoshoot successful. Of them, one that made a huge difference in my work was always bringing a shot list. In some genres (such as wedding photography), this is an absolute necessity. However, I have found it helpful in just about every genre I have shot in, from baseball, to horses, to landscapes. Making a shot list beforehand helps me to really focus on what is important and what I want to get out of a shoot. I used to avoid this simply because I was afraid having it would kill any sort of organic creativity or improvisation on the shoot, but that just is not the case. In fact, it tends to increase it, as I do not feel like I am searching for shots, since I can get what I need, then feel secure in exploring a bit more. Check out the video above for the full rundown. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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5 Comments

this article is amazing I love it

I’ve just begun to seriously add Elixxier Software set.a.light 3D to my preparation. Since I don’t have the ability to, intuitively, set up a shot on the fly, I use this application to set up shots before hand. So, on shoot day, I only have to do minor tweaking.

I'd have to agree. I've incorporated Set-a-light into my pre-production work flow. It's great software.

I see this a lot where the author touch his color checkers with his fingers. Why purchase an expensive guide and possibly contaminate it's accuracy?

I'll try to be more careful in the future! I guess it's like touching your face these days but I didn't even notice until you pointed it out, tbh - also being on camera is a little distracting(for me).