BUILD ONE TO THROW AWAY: A Photographer’s Guide to Prototyping Images with Kris Anderson

Australia-based NZIPP Accredited Photographer Kris Anderson focuses his commercial work on branding for performing arts companies, actor headshots, dance photography, and live theatre production photography. A NZIPP Master of Photography (with Distinction), Kris was recognised this year as the 2024 NZIPP Australian Professional Creative Photographer of the Year.

One of the best techniques I use for creating compelling narrative images doesn’t come from photography at all. In a previous life, as a software developer, when we were faced with a project that was tricky or a bit risky, one of our go-to techniques was building a prototype. Prototypes are cheap, temporary, unpolished, and serve a unique purpose - to help you learn about the risky or tricky problem you have to solve, so when you do the real version you do a proper job of it. If your initial approach is flawed, redesign and do another prototype! It derisks the project and gives confidence that the end product will be good.

(Make mistakes early, when they’re cheap to fix.)

I use the same technique when designing a composite image. Prototypes, mockups, storyboards… No matter the name, they bring the same benefits to photographs as they do to software. You know those shoots when you realise too late that you’ve made a mistake, and now your post-production is about salvaging a shoot instead of creating something? That sucks. Prototyping can help you avoid this.

Prototyping techniques

There are three main techniques I use for prototyping images, sketches, mockups and test shots.

Sketches are a great way to start planning shots; they’re quick, cheap, easy to discard and redo. They don’t have to be masterpieces either, you can get what you need even if you have little or no talent for drawing. My favourite sketching tool is my ipad - applications like Adobe Fresco provide gorgeous watercolour brushes that elevate my sketches from awful to adequate! I’ve grabbed a pack of post-it notes in a Sketching Emergency. Paper and pens work great.

When you’re at your computer, grabbing photos or stock from here and there to composite together a super-rough mockup is a great way to plan. You’re aiming for “quick and dirty”, so you don’t have to spend too long hunting down bits and pieces for your mockups.

I’ll very frequently do test shots with the desired location and lighting, and a stand-in instead of the final talent. Test shots are more time-consuming than sketches and mockups, but they can reveal problems with things like lighting, posing, expression and styling. They give you the time to solve problems like this, without being under pressure to fix them fast. (As long as your stand-in subjects are patient!)

Even better - you can mix and match these techniques. Sometimes I’ll take a partially-complete image and refine my next steps by sketching over it.

Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the benefits of prototyping, with examples to demonstrate.

Improve composition

The main benefit I get from prototyping images is flushing out problems with composition. If the composition is unclear in my head, a sketch can help to firm things up - understand the elements I need, the perspective and geometry of the image, the subjects and where to place them. Even when I think I understand the composition, a test shot will often reveal issues that were hard to predict from a sketch.

Here’s an example. Relentless is an image about cyberbullying; instead of leaving bullies at school, now they can follow our kids home and sneak into their rooms via social media. A kid’s bedroom should be their safe haven, but bad elements can come in right under parents’ noses.

Initially I thought Relentless would work well as a side-on image, with floating avatars of bullies on the left, and the child on the right cowering against the wall. The initial sketches and mockup helped to firm up the composition, but spending time on a test shot revealed that those opaque floating screens would either overlap one another and become too hard to distinguish, or be edge-on to the viewer and difficult to see. A second test shot with a new vantage point was much stronger, resulting in a more effective final image.

There was a happy accident in this test shot too; the subject (my daughter) pulled her feet up towards her body and wrinkled the sheets in a way that really drew the eye to her, something we replicated in the real shot.

Practice post-production

Sometimes if you have what might be a challenging postproduction technique you aren’t sure if you can master, a test shot can give you the opportunity to try it out. For example, in Restless, those floating screens incorporated a glitching effect (from saving images as sound files and running those through effects processors in Audacity, before saving them back as image files again). That was a new technique to me and I wasn’t sure if it would work, so experimenting with it in a test shot gave me the confidence to use it in the final product.

Plan and refine lighting

When lighting is a massive part of your final image, sketches help to clarify your lighting - colour, hardness, direction. I find they’re particularly useful when there is a lighting source IN the composition (practical or composite).

Here’s an example. The Muse tells the story of an artist that is driven to create commercially marketable work to sell… but the work they feel compelled to make for themselves is very different. The final image is a complete composite, and it was important to get the lighting right when shooting the main subject. Here’s one of the first sketches, annotated with lighting choices, and then the shot of the main subject (not yet integrated into the composite) with appropriate lighting. The scene had three light sources: An angry greentinted fluorescent tube above the painter, warm light from an open door to one side, and cold light coming in from an elevated window at the back.

Use as a collaboration tool

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? If you’re working on a collaborative project, a prototype of some kind is super useful for communicating it to others that might be working with you on the project. They can help you to bring others on board to your creative vision, and more deeply understand the reasoning behind choices you make.

In this sketch for Sleepless, I wanted to capture the feeling my wife related to me about how it felt sometimes when she had an anxiety attack during the night - with her head swimming in facts and tasks and responsibilities for hours, while I slept soundly next to her. She would often play a game on her phone to lull her mind to rest.

I returned home one day to find she had stuck papers all over the walls and ceiling of our room, just like in the sketch, ready to be photographed. I wasn’t around to give any direction; she interpreted what was necessary based off of the sketch.

Prototypes aren’t the perfect tool for every image - I can’t imagine a landscape photographer sketching out a beautiful tree they’re going to photograph tomorrow to get the composition right! And prototypes don’t always find every problem; I’ve still “finished” a piece and then taken it back to the drawing board after discovering weaknesses. It’s 100% ok to work on an image and let it grow and change organically without having a plan to work to. But for some images, prototypes are an absolute life-saver, helping you to ensure your completed work is effective.

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