The First Shot

I almost didn’t take the job.

I’ve done film only shoots before but for some reason this shoot was different. The client wanted film only, no digitals, my safety net.

Every film shoot I’d ever done had my digital camera. I would set the settings my light meter gave me take a shot with the digital and I had that safety net that if it looked good on my digital, it’ll look good on film.

This time I left it at home. Just the Hasselblad, the light meter, two rolls of film, and hope.

I kept running the worst case scenarios in my head. What if the light meter reads wrong? What if I loaded the film badly? What if something I have done a hundred times fails the first time with a paid client?

We got to the location. She stood in the light, I set the meter, set my camera settings and I looked through the finder, and I hear the click.

And then nothing happened. Nothing went wrong. The light was the light. The camera was the camera. I was still the person who had been doing this for twelve years.

It reminded me of going on a first date. The anticipation is nothing like the thing itself. You spend the hour before anxious and nervous, and then the date starts and you’re talking and it’s just two people in a room and all the nerves disappear. The nervousness was never about the date itself it was about what could go wrong before. But when nothing went wrong… well nothing went wrong. It’s like that saying, “we suffer more in imagination than reality.”

The same is true for the photos. Nothing was going to go wrong just because someone was paying for it. Nothing was going to magically break down because a client was watching. I just needed to remember I know what I’m doing, I’m not new at this.

One shot to remember it.