The "grass" is green enough here

A little improvisation goes a long way.

It makes the “grass” a lil’ greener on your side of the fence.

The other day while shooting a #bookboudoir session, I was in a bit of a tight spot. 

I wanted to incorporate a grass landscape for a small handful of shots of the book I was photographing, because it would visually compliment the tree on the cover.  

But Mother Nature threw a wicked curveball at me. 

It was raining outside. 

Now, I don’t know if you know this, but water does some things to paper, and none of those things are good. 

So shooting outside was a definite no-go…LAME.

But the problem still lingered. 

While marinating on a Plan B, I had one of those “duh, OF COURSE!” moments while walking through my apartment. 

In the hallway leading from one bedroom to the other, I have a fake grass runner sitting on the floor (seen in the above photo). 

A friend of mine gifted it to me in the hopes that I would potentially use it for a photoshoot of some type. 

At first, I was hesitant because it’s fake grass and it kinda, you know, looks like fake grass. At the time, I decided it would better serve as a decorative piece in my apartment than a design element for shoots. 

But, desperate times call for desperate measures!

As a result, I snapped a couple shots of the book laying on the grass:

To my surprise, they didn’t look as crappy as I thought they would!

While not an exact representation of real grass, the aesthetic it offered was pretty cool. And more importantly, the desired effect of complementing the tree on the cover was achieved. 

And even MORE importantly, no pages in this book were harmed by water during the creation of these images :)

Since that book photo session, I’ve used this fake grass runner over a dozen times with other books with great success. 

Turns out this improvisational approach produced a magical solution and has been built into my book boudoir “location” repertoire .

In this case, the juice was worth the squeeze :)

Over to you…

How do you incorporate improvisation into the work you do with your clients? Has that off-the-cuff moment been built into your approach with other clients? Please share in the comment section below