Under pressure and preparing to fail

Under pressure and preparing to fail

I remember days at work where it just wasn’t going well. I’d planned a major bit of personal work for the day, but a series of ‘phone calls and knocks on the door had left me with five half-written emails and a barely-started procedure document on screen. Then another call, from my boss, asking for an urgent opinion on some crisis that had been brewing for ages, but which nobody had decided to warn me.
It never worked in reverse: said boss had taken the wise precaution of employing a personal assistant to guard her time, even if it meant wasting everyone else’s. And she seemed to like pressure: have you gathered that I don’t?

Some people thrive on being given a day’s work to complete by lunchtime: I tend to refer to them as managerial adrenaline junkies. Me? Give me a day’s work and a three-week deadline and after a couple of days to mull it over, I could often sit down and tear through it calmly but completely, in an afternoon. It would have happened more often if PAs had extended a level or two further down the organisation.
It’s the same with photography. Some people want the burn of rushing around to get everything ready at the last minute: my ideal is to have my camera bags packed and lined up the night before, or furniture moved around to accommodate my home studio, and the lights in position. And it’s no good setting out at sunrise for that view that looks perfect in first light – you need to be up and away before the first signs of dawn in the east.

Preparation and planning matter: and I’ve long realised that the best thing is to keep it really simple at the start. Life always provides complications. I hate having to do things at the last moment, because they can go so wrong. So, in the studio, I make a little time for sorting gear out, making sure that the lights are in the right places, checking the meter readings. Then, when the model steps on set, all we have to worry about is taking pictures.



Colin Prior established his reputation with panoramic shots of the tops of Scottish mountains, taken at dawn. For these, he climbed the hill the day before, and camped on the peak. Camera set up in good time with the framing adjusted, and the only thing to do was keep an eye on the brightening sky, taking regular light readings. With a Linhof 617 and a separate meter, adjustments will have been pretty simple.
These days, we have cameras that are so much easier to use – and we can, to some extent, adjust exposure after the event. For a fast-moving subject and changing light levels, it makes perfect sense to use autoexposure: don’t put yourself under extra pressure when there’s enough to do framing, focussing and exposing!

One of the things I learned when my children were young was that landscape photography and family outings don’t mix. If I wanted to make a serious attempt at photographing something, I needed to go out for a sunset trip, or hand the children over to my wife for an hour or two while I set off on my own.

The secret of success in anything is to take the time that it needs: keep calm and stay on process. Prepare early – and this includes, I’d say, choosing the process that will be robust. Don’t set out to do something highly technical (such as the wet-plate process) if you are paying a model a high hourly rate. Try out a new idea on the pavement outside, or in the garden, rather than going out for an unrepeatable event with an untested idea.

As they say, failing to prepare is preparing to fail.