it takes a village

Pssst…want to know a little secret? Sometimes those amazing images of people taken by professionals require hard work by someone other than the photographer. Not to downplay the talent of the photographer but I never appreciated the kind of system that is sometimes needed to help create an image. We caught a glimpse of this when our guide, Ryan, made arrangements for us to do a shoot on the second day of our safari.

In an impromptu arrangement, Ryan negotiated to have several dancers from the cultural village at the Samburu Serena Safari Lodge to pose as models for us. There was a gap in communication which caused a small issue between two different tribes that had agreed to pose and when we were all done, there was a question of how they would all be compensated. Fortunately none of us had to deal with these issues as Ryan was there to handle them. During the shoot we split up into several groups and worked together holding the reflector and diffuser for each other while we took turns photographing the models. I was told that at professional shoots there is usually an assistant there to do that for the photographer. While this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what takes place at a professional shoot, it was a bit of an eye opener for me because I’ve only really thought about the photographic elements  required to create an image e.g. light, lens, composition, etc.

My post today would not be complete if I didn’t mention two other people that were part of my village during this photo shoot. First my good friend Dave Terpening. Dave is one third of my photographic trio here in Vancouver. We met at a Bryan Peterson workshop in Seattle a couple of years ago, sporting the same camera, tripod, and camera bag. Since then we’ve distinguished ourselves from each other by buying different lenses including a 50mm f/1.8 that Dave lent me for the trip. All the images today were taken with Dave’s lens. The other person I need to give credit to is my roomie (hey Krista!). She was my partner during the shoot and patiently explained what we should do with our models in terms of posing and angle of shooting. Because Krista is so used to shooting people, she was able to overcome the language barrier and work with the models. She did such a great job that others in the group joined us to get their own shots. Check out Beate’s blog for one of her pictures from the shoot. 

Since I started this journey to learn photography, one thing that consistently amazes me is how willing photographers are to help each other. Case and point, on the weekend my friend Ray offered to UPS me one of his tripod heads as I am headless at the moment. That in and of itself is a kind gesture but Ray lives in another country! OK it is just two hours away but still! I know that not all photographers are like this so I feel very blessed and I wanted to say thank you to everyone in my village.