Adapt, Improvise & Overcome: Turning a Models Cancelation into a Still Life Portrait
Every photographer I know has a story like this…
You’ve got the concept, you’ve found a model and you’ve got the location. You’ve spent hours working out all the technical details from lighting, alternative composition ideas and you have a clear idea in your head of what you want the end product to be. The day of shooting arrives, and just as you go to get set up disaster strikes. The model has cancelled on you.
This happened to me while I was studying at college. We students were lucky to have a fantastic studio space on campus kitted out with lights, backgrounds, and tools that we could book to take images for our assignments. It was early in the academic year and I was trying to get a head start on my projects.
I had been inspired while researching for essays to have a go at shooting silhouettes on block-colored backgrounds. I was nervously excited as I’d never tried taking images with this form of lighting before, and it was a great opportunity to gain a new perspective in regards to posing models.
I’d no sooner taken the coloured gels I was using over the lights out of my bag when my phone rang. My model had to cancel. It was a perfectly reasonable cancelation on their part, but now I was left with an empty studio and nothing to point my camera at. I pulled up a chair and let out a deflated sigh. I had all this motivation and inspiration and nothing to channel it into. It was in that moment where, while almost resigned to a wasted afternoon that my eyes wandered and focused in on something.
Rather luckily, and coincidentally I had been thrifting at the local charity shops that morning and had picked up a few bargains. If it wasn’t meant to be that I shoot portraiture on this occasion, then why not try out some still life photography instead?
Obviously, the objects that I had with me were considerably smaller than the person who was going to model for me. Ergo my setup had to be adjusted. Being the type of person who liked to have my setups planned well in advance, it proved to be a complete fish out of water experience trying to adapt what I had organised into something new. It is worth noting this story takes place back in the old days before smartphones enabled us to find tutorials or answers for anything at a moment's notice. After over an hour of measuring, re-measuring F-stops, and dragging lights in every direction I had FINALLY got my test shots to resemble something that looked correct from a technical standpoint.
I tried taking pictures of everything I had with me, from ornaments, fake flowers, and shoes. Some things worked out beautifully, while others did not so much. While something may look lovely in real life, some items just don’t have the outline to look good in silhouette form.
My favourite item to shoot during that session was a small, porcelain statue. The wonderful thing about it was this figure held an elegant and defined pose that produced beautiful images. So much so that later in the week, classmates who passed by my monitor while I was editing asked me who it was I had modeled for me.
So… If this story was TLDR for you, or if you just skimmed through to get to the end of the story, it can be summed up like this.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how carefully you plan, how much time you put in to try and craft the finer details, or whatever other efforts you take in trying to achieve a vision you see so clearly… sometimes it isn’t meant to be. That doesn’t mean you can’t make it a valuable experience. If you can find it in yourself to take charge, you can turn a negative situation into a positive that you otherwise would never have seen the opportunity for.
Below are a couple of a few choice images I still have copies of from that shoot.
I hope that this story helps someone find a silver lining in a situation that doesn’t go to plan. Thank you for reading!
