ICE – Imagine, Create, Execute

Before most of us ever picked up a camera, we were doodling and drawing pictures with crayons or whatever we could find that left a mark. As we grew older and some of us realized that our stick figures never really became…well, more than stick figures, we began to find other ways to express our creativity, or we lost interest in being creative all together. I loved drawing, and I spent years and years with a pencil in my hand sketching and drawing pictures. I was good at it, but what I lacked was the patience and discipline to take a project from beginning to completion, and the trash can would often be overflowing with crumbled up pieces of paper. I would get frustrated after spending hours upon hours on one drawing, get bored, and move onto the next project or idea. I was a perfectionist, and like most artists, I was never really happy with my own work, I always thought it could be better. This was my downfall because it’s what ultimately made me give up drawing and art all together, and led to me to take a different career path after high school.

Somehow, even after killing a small forest from all those scrapped drawings, I ended up getting a scholarship to the Philadelphia School of Arts…but turned it down. By the time I graduated high school I had become bored with art and felt that sports and nutrition was more interesting to me. To be completely honest I also didn’t want to have some college professor lecture me for hours on the life stories of old dead artists…or try to make me finally complete a project from start to finish.

Fast forward a couple years…ok a lot of years, and I have my first digital camera, then my first DSLR, then a few more years later I decide to start my own photography business. Photography was just a different way of being artistic, no different then drawing, I could take an idea or something I could see and turn it into a nice photograph. But it wasnt until Cass Imaging that I started mixing the two together. I learned pretty quickly that preparation and planning played a key role in making my customers happy, and being able to give them what they were paying me for.

When I began taking paid jobs, I would have an idea in my head of what I wanted to give them, but the customer would want something completely different, and it was something I struggled with at first. I quickly realized that I could no longer wait until I had the camera pointed to get creative, I had to spend more time planning. I now had to come up with and create something that was a combination of what the client wanted…and how I thought it should look.

I had to start spending time doing what I did for so many years when I was younger, sketching out my ideas, and drawing pictures again. The difference now compared to when I was younger was that I no longer had to worry about my lack of patience and discipline getting in the way, these would be rough drafts and nothing more. They no longer had to be perfect. They no longer had to be finished. The finished project would be done with my camera.

The first time I sat down with a client and started brainstorming ideas, I sketched out a few things in front of them, showing them what I had in my head. They liked everything and we went with it. Not knowing exactly how it was going to go, nor how close I would get the final image to look like the sketched one, I was a little nervous. It was a maternity shoot and the couple wanted something creative, so I had a couple of ideas sketched out and I planned the shoot around those, one of the shots coming out almost identical to the one I had on paper.

The creating step, sketching out my ideas on paper as part of the planning process is something I do a lot now. I can’t say that its something I do for every shoot or for every client, but it’s not always necessarily needed either. Some shoots require more planning then others. I now even spend more time on my sketches, and even get carried away with them sometimes, adding more detail then necessary. I’ve even started sketching out ideas for personal projects, and use it to challenge myself, trying to see how close I can get the final image to look like the sketched one.

I call this planning method of sketching out my ideas for a shoot on paper “ICE”, Imagine Create and Execute. When I get a project that I know will require a little extra planning or a project that I know will benefit from the extra sketching step I will even label the shoot as an ICE project. They don’t always work out as planned, but the extra planning always helps even if the final images don’t match up exactly like the sketches. You can see in the sketch at the bottom that was drawn in red, the original idea was to have Sandi on the end of the dock, but instead we chose to use a rock in the middle of the lake, but the same idea was there. The planning was done and it got us something to work off of before even picking the camera up.

I wanted to share this with all you to mainly emphasize the importance of planning, and maybe even challenge you to try this method. As you can see, you don’t need to be an artist to sketch out your ideas, I use stick figures most of the time. I would love to see some of your ICE projects and see how close you got to them. If you do give this a try, or already do something similar, shoot me an email with the results and I will post them up once I get a few. You can submit them through the contact page. Hope you enjoyed this, and hopefully I didn’t bore you too badly. Drop a comment letting me know if you would like me to post more articles like this.

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South Jersey based photographer and owner of Cass Imaging and The Lightshop.
http://www.jaycassariophoto.com