The Sketches Behind The Photos

It’s always the way… I’ll be daydreaming the hours away, it’ll be raining or cloudy outside and I’ll suddenly have a flood of inspiration and ideas for photos that I just can’t shoot at that time, whether it’s because it actually IS cloudy and rainy or because it’s 3am and I don’t have my camera with me… I still need to do something about it.
Sometimes I’ll wake up from a dream in the morning about a fantastic photo shoot my brain had created while I was asleep and sometimes I’ll have nothing better to do than to scribble a sketch here or there. This is why, if I can’t always carry my camera, I make sure to always carry my storyboard notebook with me! It’s not only handy to record all the ideas I have but it’s also handy to refer to it on shoots!
When I shot a wedding in Paris last year I decided to get an early night before the big day, so I tucked myself in, turned off the boring French television show I was staring at and closed my eyes. I don’t think I was down more than a minute before my brain started working overtime with all these ideas that were coming to me. I didn’t end up having that early night, but I did come up with some things that I either put into place directly the next day, or morphed into something else. I have no doubt that if I hadn’t have listened to the inspiration and done something with it, I would have lost it by morning and not gotten all the shots I did.
Obviously, the sketches are not mini masterpieces, but they do help, even if they’re simple line drawing with minimal detail! Sometimes they’re more elaborate and sometimes they’re simple scribbles. I find that if I record what I think, then I end up recreating most of it during shoots and sometimes even get other ideas while actually setting up a shot I’ve drawn earlier. I’m sure I’m not the only photographer out there to do this and I wonder… how many of you awesome readers do something similar?