The Quality of the brief the photographer gets is a very important but sometimes a very underestimated part of any commissioned shoot. I recently did a shoot for a small UK Based jewelry company and needless to say, their briefs were not up to scratch. It had very little direction and contained no images. Instead we were referred to a variety of websites, all whose content change almost daily, as an example of what the company likes. I gave the same brief to a number of different stylists and the ideas they came up with were miles apart. Some of them were high gloss and glamorous, others were quirky and indie.
In normal circumstances, a brief would have been prepared properly by the commissioning company. The photographer and stylist would have, in reply to this, created a treatment, that is 4 or 5 pages of what they ideas they have about style, that would have been then signed off by the client. The photographer would then prepare a detailed Pre-pro (pre-production notes) that will include all the relevent information.
But once again. If the original brief does not have some kind of style direction in you can prepare a treatment that will be completely different to what the client wants.
For the lighting geeks out there: On this shoot I used one big softbox that was directly above the camera. In fact, I was half wedged under the softbox and sometimes stood in front of it. This keeps the lighting setup nice and simple which suits the effect. I rarely like over-elaborate lighting, except when I have quite a few people in the shoot, the multiple lights is a must. Because the two subjects were so close together in this shoot, elaborate lighting was not necessary so the basic Butterfly set-up was enough.
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