Importance of a test shoot.

Recently I was contacted to do a shoot at the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, which as it turns out I have never been to. I'm sure we have all been to Mt Cootha Botanic Gardens but how many of you have been to the Alice St ones? This shoot was booked for a Thursday afternoon at 5pm and being that I have never been and its location I decided I should probably go and check it out and do a test shoot.

I went the Sunday prior to the scheduled shoot at you guessed it, 5pm. I managed to convince my lovely partner and test dummy for many shoots and assignments, Liz to once again come and be my fill in model for the afternoon. We were running slightly behind because of bad traffic coming home from the beach, typical Sunshine Coast traffic on a sunday though. Parking was actually super easy for a sunday arvo in the city and only had a short walk to the location.

Now as neither of us had been there before we wanted to see as much of the park as we could whilst capitalizing on the fading light. As we moved around the park we looked for anything of interest, bench seats, trees, flowers, light you know the deal. I was surprised about how big the park actually was and I'm certain we would of only seen about half of it all up, but we had a blast no doubt.

This is a little off track but it does get on track again after this paragraph I promise. My partner and me are absolute Cattle dog fanatics! Well dogs in general but definitely Cattle dogs, so basically what happens whenever we are out anywhere if either of us see a Cattle dog (or any dog) we immediately announce it to the other. Surely we aren't the only ones that do this? Anyway I spotted a LARGE Cattle dog off in the distance and suggested to Liz that we head up this way toward the dog.

Once we got near the puppy he quickly noticed us, we played it cool and acted as if we hadn't walked all the way over there just to see the dog ( which we 100% did and do often). The lady who owned the dog (Bonza) said he loves people and we would have to pat him now.

We obviously obliged and immediately began smothering this ladies dog, who was very happy to see us of course. After a few pats and kisses and a good chat with the owner, we unfortunately had to say farewell to Bonza and his owner. He was a massive dog and I really wish we could of kept him ( I've been calling my dog Bonza since and Liz is getting over it ). Okay enough about the dog, but I had to share, also my apologies but there isn't a photo of Bonza.

Amazing warm light reflected of one of the near by office buildings. This light was so good to work with and it was getting quite dark. This phenomenon happened at 5:45pm and didn't last long, so we got a heap of shots here and then we basically ran out of light. I new that I didn't want to push my ISO above 400, although my camera can really shoot at about 1000 before the grain gets too noticeable, I didn't want to push my luck.

Without doing this test shoot I would've been walking in blind so to speak to a very important shoot. I didn't know the client, I didn't know the location (or how to get there or where to park) I wasn't entirely sure what the client wanted exactly and I didn't know how the lighting would be or how long it would last. All these things that I couldn't and wouldn't take a chance on come shooting day, and I wouldn't recommend anyone go into a shoot without knowing or having some degree of knowledge of the above mentioned details.

Because I did this test shoot, on the day of the actual shoot (which went great by the way) I knew exactly when I had to leave, where to park and already had a list of interesting locations to suggest to my client. Not only that I had a good understanding of the lighting and timing that I had available and was able to confidently conduct the shoot and get some great shots for my client with much less stress and worry then if i hadn't done this.