15/05/2019
Hmmm, I don’t usually post negative things online, but as a personal note for my photography journey (and to act as a memory which is basically what this page is about), this posting just had to go into the journal.
This evening was a nice photo-shoot of a local three bedroom semi-detached, that was relatively new, bright and very well presented. This one ‘should’ have been a doddle.
However, things immediately got a little interesting when I asked the vendor to move their car from the driveway so that I could get a clear front shot of the property. On a tight and busy street, it was great to have just the owner's car in the way, unusually the next door neighbour’s car was away. My luck was in this evening, or was it? The response was, something along the lines of “You don’t need to do the front because I have given the agent a wonderful photograph of the front of the house”. Or in other words, I heard, I have the perfect image and you will not get better.
Oooo, a photographer taking images of a photographer's house. This was going to get interesting.
OK, a strange situation, but hey ho.
So I step inside and it quickly becomes clear that this was one shoot where I would not be in control. In fact, I had to ignore one room totally because of easily moved items the were 'not' to be moved, a less nice view of the garden because I was not allowed to cross the garden, half a bedroom for reasons I’ll not go into online, and god forbid I should move a bin.
As well as being told how and where to take the images, I was put on a tight timescale and questions were asked why I was using a tripod and why did I need more than one ‘quick’ snap of each room. At one point I was told that I’d not be able to take an image of the garden because the tripod would not fit through the narrow patio door. Ahem, the legs close up 😉.
At the end of the shoot, I also had a lecture about some photographer that I'd never heard of and whose first published image was the first image taken in a photo-shoot. I'm not quite sure of the relevance but maybe it was a way of telling me that I'd taken too many shots, from too many angles and that I should have nailed it in the first shot. Perhaps there is some truth in that, but we live in a digital world now and why take one when I can take 10 and choose the best?
Anyway, despite the extra pressure and knowing that my shots will never be as good as vendors, I’m pretty pleased with the results. It’ll just be a real shame that the full set will now feature two separate styles, rather than one consistent style – or maybe the agent will simply end up posting the vendors images online.
It’s all good fun working with the public.
