Workflow advices and how to improve your photos! [about preparations]

Hello my Sweethearts!
How are doing these days? ) We entered full winter mode here in Siberia: street covered in snowdrift and freeze around -10C -20C! Just usual autamn, haha )
Cold days and very hot days (in another part of the world) are coming quickly, so please take proper care of yourself. Life is not always about work and studies, but enjoying everything even small things. And bad health condition doesn't help.

Starting form my very begining as a full time creator here, during every preparation to photoshoots we went throu some necessary changes in workflow and view on characters.
Here is a small advices I want to share with you.  They worked for me,so hope it'll somehow help you too. This advice concerns preparation and planning shots (also my thoughts).

Watch references only before shoot and don't try to recreate them on shoot. It's a good thing to study character (specific poses, signature facial expressions, popular official or fan made images), but it also may affect you in a bad way. Here is why.
As I said before, some poses and images are look good only being drawn, in your head or with better light equipment (also huge amount of time). No matter how hard you want to rework image or someones photo in your style, mostly it won't work and it'll leave bitter taste. Or it needs to reworked too hardly in photoshop, which is not good in my opinion )

My assistant always prepares huge amount of reference images for the shoot. Fan-loved I say ) It's a good thing sometime to try to recreate some images (if they are great and beloved, why not?), but you may lose precious working time and end up not doing your thing. Because you'll start to think about things that should be preapared before actual work.

Another reason why not to look at references on set is pretty simple and somehow dumb )
Some artists and photographers are just better and skillfull than you. Don't upset yourself and work freely. You can have planty of time to study and practice later, so one day you'll become like or better them. Do your thing and don't distract your own vision.

It took me some time to understand thing about "distraction" and how it may affected me in past.
Here is what can really improve your imagination and photos. Wow, sounded like I'm proest pro, haha )
Brainstorm and experiment. Write every idea in your note. Do it everytime before actual shoot. Brainstorming helps to warm up your imagination muscle and prepare full list of poses. Experimenting with composition and light scemes helps not to waste your time on set.
I say it twice: Write everything on paper (every pose or experiment). It'll help better on set than prepared reference imagies and you won't miss anything. Did you notice, that written idea frees mind? )
Ofcourse before all that, fill yourself with great examples of art and etc. )
Prepare photoshoot list. Even simple, like: 10 poses (from important to least), small description on each, set locations, basic light scemes and how much time you have. Can't remember how it called in film production ) Ah, shooting schedule.

This advices are touching only shooting part of preproduction. Things like preparing concept, costume, props, make up pattern, finding and choosing model, finances, finding and renting locations are topics for future and they are very complex to be written in one post )

These advices are pretty simple and may sound like copybook maxims . But every complex work consists of simple ones )

Hope it was interesting to read and will help to someone.
Next time I'll share with inside story from my last shoot, hope you are excited )

Have a great upcoming weekend and be healthy!