Learning From Failure: A "Failed" Shoot

Hey everyone! I (Arabela) am finally back from break. I took a few extra days off simply because I was exhausted from the back to back trips and truthfully I just needed that additional bit of time to settle back into life. Elle is still on her honeymoon in the Maldives and I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little jelly but I'm happy that we both got (and are still getting) some much needed time off. It's wild to think that out of the 4 years (almost 5) that we've been in business neither of us have truly been OOO the way we have this time around. I say this because every holiday season, we take about 2-2.5 weeks off and we're usually still checking in and doing social media but this time around, we pre-scheduled everything and did not ~check in~ whatsoever. Wild stuff but I'm happy we did that because we deserve it, haha! I think there's something to be said for completely disconnecting from work and especially social media. In a way, I feel more connected to my business and what I do when I can step away for some time.

Anywho, that's not at all what I'm here to talk about so let's switch gears! Today's post is an embarrassingly honest one. It's part story, part lesson and I think you guys might relate because who hasn't failed in the past, am I right or am I right? Like I said, we've been doing this thing for almost 5 years and we still make mistakes and/or things just don't go as we like them to. Today's post is an ode to a "failed" photo shoot, haha. Just kidding, no odes here because we're not words people and we sure as heck aren't poems people either. Ok but I put failed in quotes because I like to believe that all "fails" are really lessons. Or if not lessons, opportunities... for growth, for change, for realizations, etc. You catching my drift yet? Well, we had a "failed" shoot you guys and oh boy did we learn.

Thank the photo shoot gods that this happened to be a personal project shoot and not a client shoot because both of us would have been eternally embarrassed. Actually scratch that, maybe we wouldn't have because we're pretty organized and structured when it comes to client work. However, for this particular shoot, we connected with our longtime friend and creative Claire Xue of Moodelier. She recently came out with a new Moodelier collection of "life-sized" products which are these fun stackable decor pieces that either have a wavy or flat side and you can configure them in multiple ways. They're pretty large items which is not bad at all but a lot of what we shoot is typically small products so it was going to be fun and interesting to see how we would go about photographing these gigantic shapes.

To be completely honest, I don't know whether there was one reason in particular about this shoot that made it go the way it did but perhaps a combination of a few things. Firstly, we did almost zero planning for this shoot. I believe Elle and I just talked about it here and there briefly and we decided that we should do some kind of "home decor" shoot. Elle suggested she could pick up some home items from Target and that was literally it. We also didn't nail down what background or colors we wanted to work with and so it really was all up to whatever we decided day of. We figured... what the heck. We've got a whole wall of props and all kinds of fabrics and papers. Why shouldn't this be a piece of cake? Guys, everything we preach about doing when working on personal projects, we did not do this time around. BIG sigh. Obviously we apologized to Claire on the day of our mini shoot how unprepared we were/felt and she was so gracious and just helped us out through the whole thing.

So many little things happened from Elle and I not agreeing on the background, the colors, placement of products, the products themselves, how we wanted to style the Moodelier blocks and so forth. It was honestly one of our worst shoots ever, haha! Nothing was working and we felt so awful for Claire for wasting her time even though she didn't feel that way. At the end, she took a few photos of us on the lilac blocks for some fun little work bestie portraits. In the end, we said "never again." LOL!

See below for a little screenshot of some of the images we captured and will probably not see the light of day. Except for the one we used in the main photo for this post. That image was probably the only salvageable image, haha!

So what did we learn from this little experience?

Well, even though we knew this, this shoot definitely confirmed that we cannot work in the same capacity that we normally do if there isn't some kind of plan, aka a shoot plan and/or more thought-out art direction. Like I said, we knew this and we still decided to take a gamble and look where that ended up. Second, we realized that if there's no communication between us, then something like this was bound to happen. I think an additional reason for why the images just didn't work (for me personally) was that I wasn't particularly inspired by the products we decided to shoot with the Moodelier shapes. Moodelier is cool, trendy, and forward. The clash of the Target home decor pieces just didn't work and I was having a hard time liking the images for that reason. Again, if we had sat down to talk about our ideas ahead of time, we might have decided to purchase some more unique and colorful home decor pieces from a brand like HAY or Poketo and I think that shoot would have gone a lot differently. But HAY, we live and we learn.... Sorry, had to throw that pun in there... Hehe!

Thank you guys for being a part of this community and for reading this honest and embarrassing post. I hope this shows you guys that we're far from perfect. It's ok to be inspired by other creatives but I would refrain from idolizing people too much. There's more going on behind the scenes than you think. In fact, there's a lot of content we've created that we think isn't our best or wasn't our favorite and that's ok. You don't learn from "doing great" all the time. You learn by making mistakes and having things go wrong. Again, thank you so much for reading and if you've had a "failed" shoot before, definitely let us know in the comments or over on Slack! We're all about being vulnerable here. :)

Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela