What You Need to Ask Yourself Before a Shoot

You need to determine how far you’re comfortable traveling to a shoot the morning of the shoot. Experiment. Look for patterns. Some people might be comfortable traveling for two-and-a-half hours and taking an hour break before you shoot and then shooting that day.

We encouraged one student to drive to a shoot for 30 minutes and drive to a shoot for three hours and shoot and see how he did. Then the next one, go the night before and do what he’s supposed to do.

You need to know when you need to go the night before, and the only way you’re going to know this is for you to try it.

How many events can you shoot and do well at a big shoot? Are you a morning shooter or an evening shooter? What breakfast food do you start best with? That’s huge the older you get. How does your preparation for small shoots differ from a large shoot?

You’ve got to pace yourself at a big shoot. You can run out of gas at the end. So you want fewer events in the last couple of days. What do you eat at midday? Do you eat light or heavy? How does heat affect you?

What time do you need to go to bed the night before to shoot well the next morning? What time and what do you need to eat the night before for you to have a good performance the next day?

You can control these things, and you must, through experimentation, find out what makes you tick the best.

This is an excerpt from the September 2012 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.