Shooting main fashion every week for a weekly magazine means time is almost never on your side. Ok forget the almost, its never on your side.
This leaves me with three options. Quit and run for the hills (did cross my mind on one or two occasions when I started out), make my shoots look mega boring on a white back drop in a studio each week, or, stretching myself pretty thin, thinking outside the box and traveling to all four corners of the country, or nearly the earth and busting our arses trying to make something really beautiful, yet cost and time effective, without feeling an urge to clone myself.
I’ve dragged my team up a slightly active looking volcano in a bid to get the perfect shot, made a model wear spring summer collections in the Ice bar at minus 5 degrees (Billie from Premier I’m permanently indebted) made the kids in Disneyland believe my model was Elsa from Frozen so we could get her in the roped off area to shoot, I even shoved Kerry Katona in some random foliage and pretended she was ‘Queen of the Jungle’ for a second time.
The challenges of time and magazine parameters can no doubt be stressful, but I love how much the pressure has pushed me and really made me experiment in ways I perhaps wouldn’t should I have buckets of cash to throw at every situation, and too much time to mull over every detail. I’m never ever disappointed with the results.
So ironically, channeling the stress into determination out of fear, manifests itself into something positive. Stepping out of my comfort zone, literally on a weekly basis means better pages to pay my wages (see what i did there.) Its that simple. So never say no to something that scares you. (check out that for a cliche, defo got that from Mufaser in the Lion King… he also said that being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble. Word.) I just hope Kerry will one day forgive me for making her climb into a public plant pot.
