Got up a tad late this morning, got out to the classroom, and received my assignment: The Children’s Institute. The assignment was expanded from yesterday: a 10-shot photo essay, with captions, reporting on a series of events. Due by 7p. We were required to spend at least a full hour doing preplanning, which I definitely chafed at. I was itching to get out and shoot! The discipline of pre-planning is valuable and out of all I’ve learned this week is perhaps the most impacting on my approach to shooting an event.

During my pre-planning, I began formulating a story and came up with a shot list and some objectives. I then spent two hours shoot 1,435 photos of the CI. Will let me use his 70-200 f/2.8G VR lens, which was awesome. The lens is HEAVY, but the quality of the images is amazing. I shot out my shot list, then spent the afternoon keywording all of the photos, watching while Will rated every single one (I have to applaud his patience in that) and trying to assemble my story.

At this point I was stymied; the shots I was aiming for at the beginning of the day just weren’t as cool as I thought they would be. My story didn’t flow, it wasn’t tight and cohesive. I continued playing with it, and eventually got 12 images I thought would work. I began typing in captions, and then figured out which two images I could pull. Finally, I took my ten captions, copied them into a Word doc, and began editing them as if they were paragraphs in a story (which in a sense they were; each one represented a photo and they each related to each other). Pasting these edited captions back into Lightroom, I felt that I had a cohesive essay. God was good; I honestly didn’t see it coming together in the amazing way it did.