Cooperation and My Decision

Sometimes in life it's about working with people, and the bringing the skills and energy of both together create more. Sometimes, well, sometimes, it's better to provide a person with a more limited set of choices.

These two scenarios are very different, but in someways, relate, so just trust me for a little bit here.

First there is Meagan. She is 10, and a nationally ranked wake boarder. I don't ask certain questions, like "Why do they rank 10 year old female wake boarders?" I just nod and smile. So the photo request is basically, "cute kid photo". Right.

Take a fair number of photos of her, I'm feeling okay, but not good, so I ask her if there is anything she'd like to do. She starts hamming it up, sometimes all tough, sometimes all modelly, whatever she felt like. I had just let hamster out of the cage and it was now tearing around the room. She had been kind of somber, serious, then she got all happy and was having a good ole' time.

As I see it, she wanted to set her image, she wanted to create the view of her, rather than have, probably yet another adult do it for her. And it worked out all for the better. Some of the photos I know we won't use, but we may choose one of her having more fun for the one image we do run. I hope so.

On the other side, and the identity here will be obscured so as hopefully nobody knows who I'm talking about, out of kindness, (though to be fair, I will happily have the discussion with the performer, but I believe it is between me and the performer), but I have a performer who I made some images of who needs further assistance in helping choose their imagery.

To be less vague, but still vague, I took a number of photos of a friend/performer as a favor. I then gave the performer some nice cleaned up images, and as is my normal, but sometimes bad, habit, I also gave them access to some of the outtakes. The reason I give performers access to the outtakes is in case what they are looking for, the image they are looking to craft of themselves isn't represented in the images I like.

Usually this works at least okay. In this case, limits will be placed in the future. The photos the performer has chosen to use are images where the face is in total or near total black, washed out white, slightly out of focus, etc. There are some really nice, clean shots, moody, attention grabbing, etc. Those are the unused images.

I don't get it. I've got some guesses, but they are only guesses as to what this performer was going for. Could be business issues, could be personal, could be combo, could be anything, I just disagree.

Yeah, these are currently only small web images, but I'm me, and I don't care, and I demand the best all the time.

Oh well, maybe some further structure in the future will help. I'll try that and see what happens. Alas, this performer is really quite good and I'd like to help this performer out. And will, even if I don't agree, and don't understand.

On a side note, I think I like the Cha-Cha. I got done with dance class tonight and was Cha-Chaing down the aisles of Jewel.