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When I mentor new and young photographers, the same scene plays out over and over. They hand me a phone or a tablet to show me an image they are proud of, and I ask a simple question: can I see the rest of the shoot? Far too often, there is no rest of the shoot. A few frames of each idea, and sometimes only the one frame they just showed me.
That tells me one of two things, and I am going to be blunt about it. A photographer who walks away with one frame is either very lazy or very arrogant. Lazy because they didn’t bother to explore any other options, or arrogant because they were convinced that the first thing they tried was the best possible version and nothing could top it. Either way, you are not going to improve your photography like that.
The cure is a habit I have been preaching for decades: work the shot.
And just so we are clear, working the shot has nothing to do with being that cliché guy with a camera telling his model “work it baby, that’s hot!” Please don’t be that guy. I will tell you at the end of this article what your subject actually wants to hear from you, and I promise it is not that.
What “Work the Shot” Actually Means
“Work the shot” means that when something is worth photographing, you don’t take a picture. You explore a photograph.
You shoot your intended idea, and then you stay. You change the angle. You change the distance. You change the pose, the framing, the light, the crop. Every variation is a deliberate decision, a small experiment with a purpose.
Notice the word deliberate. Working the shot is not spray-and-pray. Holding down the shutter and machine-gunning 300 identical frames involves exactly as much thinking as taking one frame, which is to say none at all. The goal is not more frames. The goal is more ideas, and the frames are simply the evidence of those ideas.The fact of the matter is there is a very simple argument for this kind of effort. If something is worth photographing, it is worth putting effort into. The more effort you put in, the more photographs you make. The more photographs you make, the more mistakes you make. The more mistakes you make, the more opportunities you have to learn. And the more you learn, the faster and better you grow as a photographer. There are no shortcuts in that chain, and every link in it starts with the decision to stay with the shot instead of walking away from it.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
Example #1: Five Shots From One Setup
Here is a shot that I did for a young woman’s first modeling portfolio.
It is a simple, relaxed, casual shot lit with one studio strobe bounced up into the ceiling. The white walls did the rest of the work. No fancy accessories or fu-fu.
This was my intended shot. I asked her to sit with her back to the wall and shot about 45 frames with simple variations of her head, hands, and expression. I wanted relaxed, pleasant, and engaging, and I got it.
I didn’t stop there.
Next, I asked her to turn toward me and sit with her back against the other wall. All I changed was her hands and the position of her foot, moving it to the center so I wasn’t making a crotch shot. Still one light bounced into the ceiling. Another 40 frames or so to get the right expression.
Things were going well, and I had only invested about five minutes so far, so I asked her to pull her legs up toward her chest, again using her foot to block the blue panties. About 30 more frames with the same light.
Then my makeup artist flipped her hair over to one side. I asked her to lean forward, rest her hands on her knees, and I shot some headshots. Another 45 frames.
At this point, I was about 15 minutes into the series, and about 5 of those were spent on hair. I decided to finish with something a little more creative and had her do some hair flips. This took about 10 minutes, and I only shot 15 frames because you get exactly 1 frame per flip, and the process requires some choreography and coordination. If you want to learn how to shoot hair flips, I made a video about it.
The net result: five different shots from one setup, with one light, in under half an hour. That is working the shot.
Now for the honest part. The first three were so similar that only one of them made her portfolio, along with the close-up headshot. The hair flip didn’t make the book at all. That does not make those frames wasted. Great photographs are the result of hard work, planning, exploration, mistakes, and a little serendipity. You don’t get the serendipity without the exploration.
Example #2: One Look, Four Photographs
Let me show you another way to work a shot.
This is a beauty shot that my makeup artist and I planned to shoot in black and white. We did some heavy contouring on the model’s cheeks to make the monochrome image more dramatic, and I lit it with a fluorescent lighting rig that I demonstrate in this video.
The look was so distinctive, with its hairstyle and makeup, that the challenge became: what else can I make out of this?
BTW, when I want a black and white image – I set my cameras profile to B&W/Monochromatic so that I am seeing the image in black and white.
This first shot took only a few minutes and about 30 frames to get just the right expression.
I am not one to pass on opportunity when I am in the studio, so the challenge then became what could we turn this into before moving on to a new makeup and hairstyle look.
My next step was to shoot in color, crop off the top of her head so you couldn’t see the hairstyle, and add black vinyl to create drama in the color shot.
Not wanting to quit there, I removed the vinyl, cropped even tighter, and overexposed slightly.
Last but not least, we messed up her little poof of hair and threw some glitter on her. When all else fails, throw glitter at it!
This is the same model, same session, and yes – the same makeup. Four completely different photographs, because I kept exploring what else was possible instead of declaring victory after the first frame.
This Is Not Just a Studio Thing
Please understand that this concept applies to ANY photograph that is worth taking, in any genre.
A landscape changes by the minute as the light moves, and so should you. Walk 30 feet to your left and the foreground is completely different. Get low, and the weeds become a frame. Wait ten minutes, and the clouds rewrite the sky. A building is not one photograph; it is fifty, depending on where you stand, what time it is, and what you include in the frame. A street market, a hiking trail, your grandkids in the backyard, the same thinking applies everywhere.
The only honest exception is the fleeting moment, the split second that happens once and never again. You capture those; you don’t work them. Everything else is an invitation. If it is not a fleeting moment, you need to work the shot.
After the First Frame, Ask Why
Your first frame is the door opening. It is the beginning of creating a great image – not the end.
Once you have that first frame, ask yourself the most valuable question in photography: why? Why did this scene catch your eye? Decide if it was the light or the subject. Maybe it was a composition possibility or a special moment about to happen?
The answer to that question directs every variation that follows. If it was the light, chase the light through different angles. If it was the subject, get closer and simplify. If you don’t know what you are responding to, your variations are just random, and random is only slightly better than lazy.
Every Frame You Take Is a Deposit
Working the shot pays you twice. The first payment is the shot itself, the keeper you would never have found on frame one. The second payment is bigger.
Photography is an experiential skill. Every frame you take, including the failures, including the ones you will never show another human being, adds to the visual database that your eye and brain draw from every time you pick up the camera.
The awkward pose helps you learn what awkward looks like, so you can fix it faster next time. The variation that didn’t work teaches you why the one that did work works. You cannot get that kind of recall from watching YouTube videos. You have to earn it one frame at a time.
Frames Are Free. Act Like It.
When I started in this business, every press of the button cost real money in film and processing, and we still worked our shots because the results demanded it. Today a frame costs you virtually nothing. Yet I constantly watch photographers shoot as if every click costs them a dollar.
Don’t treat a click like it costs you money. The most expensive photograph in the world is the one you didn’t take, followed closely by the better version you never looked for.
What Your Subject Really Wants to Hear
I promised to tell you what your model or portrait subject really wants to hear from you, and it is really, really simple. They don’t want to hear “that’s hot.” They don’t even need to hear that they look great, although kind words never hurt. What they want to hear is click, click, click, click, click.
Think about a shot from your subject’s perspective. They cannot see what you see, so they have no idea whether what they are doing is working. The only feedback your subject gets is your voice and the click of your shutter.
A quiet camera is terrifying. Silence becomes uncomfortable and generates anxiety. A steady stream of clicks reassures your subject that everything is working and to keep going. That confidence relaxes them, and a relaxed subject photographs better than a directed one every single time.
Working the shot doesn’t just produce more ideas. It produces a better experience for the person in front of your lens, and that shows up in the photographs.
Press the Button, Then Stay
I recently wrote about epicopathy, the condition where a photographer won’t press the button unless the picture promises to be epic. Epicopathy is the disease that keeps the camera in the bag. Working the shot is what the cure looks like once the camera is out. Pressing the button is step one. Everything you just read is steps two through fifty.
Now go pick up that camera and shoot something! Because – “Your BEST shot is your NEXT shot!” — Joe Edelman
