Will Robb Photography

Quite often photo shoots just never go as planned, so you have to be able to adapt.

This time last year I was hired to photograph a singer for the cover of her CD jacket as well as some of the shots for the inside spread. It was one of those jobs where I had the feeling from the word go that it just wasn’t going to turn out as planned. I met the singer well in advance to discuss what she wanted done. She produced a copy of Vogue and showed me some photos of models standing under a spotlight in a studio with expensive gowns on and wild make-up. She said she already had the hairdresser, the make-up artist, a nail artist and also a body painter lined up so we didn’t have to worry about the cost of them, just the studio hire and my fee. I explained I didn’t have a studio, I would have to hire one for an afternoon and if she was wanting a Vogue type spread I would have to shoot on medium format film, she had talked about using different outfits so I’d need a lot of film, but when I worked out what that would cost she said the budget wouldn’t cover that, so could I do it cheaper an basically do it at cost….erm, no. She wasn’t happy, but she then decided that she liked the idea of shooting outside under the neon lights in Shinjuku as the sun was going down and the sky had a nice pink or blue glow. This would be much easier and would keep the costs down, so we agreed on that and a price that worked for both of us.

There was a few weeks to the shoot, so I scouted out different locations, took some test shots and sent them on to her. She was loving the locations, I was getting an idea in my head about what was going to happen, I had visions of her in the middle of traffic islands standing still for a few seconds and the cars streaked past, standing still on crossroads as shadowlike figures moved past in blurs but she was staring at the camera, her pressing herself against a wall looking up at the neon that would send different colours over her face. I was looking forward to it. However, none of this came to be.

We had to postpone the shoot due to bad weather, but we agreed one day after she had saw the forecast that we would shoot the next day. She would get her make-up etc done and we would meet in Shinjuku at 3.00pm and go round some different spots as the sun started to go down around 4.30ish. So, next day I have all my gear and I am on the 1 hour train journey into town when I get a call from her. She’d been out all night, just woken up, the nail artist was sick and couldn’t come out, so could we meet at the nail studio in Meguro. Not much choice in the matter, so said yes.

I got to the nail studio, the hair and make-up people were there and the singer eventually strolled in late with her manager and some of her friends who came along to watch. No hair done, no make-up done, didn’t want to get the train to Shinjuku later, so now I had to go and scout out some new locations nearby. I wandered about for a couple of hours as she was getting ready, found some half decent places, but nothing spectacular, so I guessed they would have to do. Got back, everything was near enough ready, once the hair was done, the make-up on, the nails were great and she already had some body painting done the day before, so we were ready to roll. Got outside, walked for 5 minutes to the first spot, the wind picked up, blew her hair into a mess and she was freezing in her skimpy dress, only did a couple of test shots before she declared it was too cold and didn’t want to be photographed outside.

Back to the nail studio to rethink. “How about we shoot in here?” someone suggested. It was small, the walls were covered in posters about nail art, furniture was everywhere and it wasn’t really looking good. I didn’t bring any lighting with me other than my flash as the places we were going to shoot in Shinjuku were well lit and only needed the flash. In these situations you just have to adapt, so we moved the furniture, took down posters and tried to make some kind of space that wasn’t cluttered where we could actually shoot. We just about managed it, but it the lighting wasn’t great as we had to make do with desk lamps and my flash, her clothes just didn’t seem right and all her make-up staff and stylists kept telling her the other clothes she brought just didn’t work with her make-up etc and to be honest, the shots just weren’t working either. I’d been been out scouting locations in the cold, been twiddling my thumbs waiting for make-up to be done and re-done as everyone sat smoking in the cramped room and once we got started I had very little to go on. Then one of her friends piped up “How about you just get naked?”

The clothes weren’t going down well, they were covering her body paint as well, I was thinking it probably was a good idea to make the shots more interesting, so we went for that option instead. The lighting was pretty awful so I suggest we go for B&W images as then people wouldn’t be able to see the crappy walls so much and it it would maybe give a bit of an artsy feel to it. Also, if it looked kind of sexy it would help grabs people attention a bit more. So, after hours of false starts and changing plans we finally got some decent shots. The CD cover in the end actually looked nothing like my shots due to a massive dose of photoshoping (that’s what happens when your images are “edited” by other for commercial purposes.

The initial shots of her worked out OK under the circumstances. Would have been much better had they went for the studio option, but we did OK with what we had to work with.