what was supposed to happen? what did happen? what went right? what went wrong? what should we add to our plan for next time?
five questions. five essential questions that you must ask yourself after every exercise in order to add that real-time element to the learning process.
and let’s talk about that for a moment, the learning process. i think sometimes it’s easy to see someone who has made it and only see the success. but what you’re really seeing when you see success is a process applied and proven.
the after action review is the process that i learned, one of the few lessons that i still hold on to from my days in the military. it’s an underrated reason why our military is one of the best in the world. think of it as instant learning.
so let’s use a real-life example to show how this works.
what was supposed to happen?
i wanted to take a photo of a couple standing under the lights in time’s square looking up and over the camera with a blur of the crowd and traffic around them. i would light them with my softbox so that they stood out a bit more. once i had the shot of them in place, i would have them move aside and capture several half-second exposures of the crowd and traffic moving, then stack these images for the blur effect i wanted.
what did happen?
when i dug in my bag, i realized that i was missing my flash trigger, so there was no way i could take the exact shot i had planned in my mind. i improvised and had them stand very still for a half-second, and while the shutter was open, i used the pilot button on my flash to set it off and light them. since i had to do this several times to get it right, i didn’t have time to get the ambient shots i was planning on getting and i had to work with just one bit of crowd and traffic blur.
what went right?
first of all, i didn’t freak out and lose my cool when i realized the flash trigger wasn’t in my bag. the lighting workaround worked as i hoped it would and i ended up getting two good takes out of the several that i attempted. the couple was very patient. while the photos looked a bit messy out of camera, i was able to edit them into shape and the final result is, while not 100% what i wanted, a really good shot that i was happy to send out. given that the client only contacted me the morning of the session asking if i was free that night, and that i had to rush home to queens after work, eat a quick dinner, grab my bag and run out the door with only about five minutes for a quick gear check, i would say it went a lot more right than it could have.
what went wrong?
first off, i tried to do something for a client that i’ve never done before. that was probably stupid of me. next, i didn’t do a full visual inspection of my gear before leaving the house, and i didn’t do a good job of packing up after my last photo shoot either because as it turns out i left my flash trigger behind and now have to go retrieve it. so that is two counts of failing to do proper equipment checks.
what should i add to my plan to improve for next time?
i can make printed checklists that force me to check for every piece of gear in my bag before leaving for and from gigs. and i can go to time’s square at night when i have an hour to take test shots of the moving crowd to experiment and learn the specifics of how to get the effect i’m going for.
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so that’s it. an after action review. one gig, two valuable lessons that if applied, already make me a consistently better photographer than anyone who hasn’t learned those lessons for themselves. the accumulation of these over time become my own personal manual of how to become a better photographer. it is a process, and not one that can be completed overnight. but one lesson at a time, or in this case, two, it will happen. and one day people will look at your work and see the results of your process. they will look for mistakes, and they won’t find them, because you will have learned not to make them.