Over the past few weeks, I've been working hard to release my second E-book. While I can't give you exact details yet, I've learned so much from the process, and I wanted to share that with all of you.
1. It's time-consuming
We took about 20 pictures of each pose, and sometimes got me in the middle of adjustments like this hair flip.
I'll be honest; when I began this project I knew how long things were going to take, and it still didn't register in my mind how huge this was going to be. I flew my cousin Dani out to be my photographer and help edit the book so it would go quicker, but between five-hour-long photo shoots, constant editing of those photos, and all of the writing involved-each of the days we worked on it, the e-book took over our lives. It had to! Nothing is going to get done if you only work in two-hour chunks on things like this, because it's hard to motivate yourself to start working. The way to do it is to get up knowing that you're just going to take photos and edit them all day, and then stick to that. It eats up your time, but it's worth it to be able to see at the end of the day the crazy amount of progress that you have made.
2. Self-motivation is key
The number of times I thought to myself during our photo shoot, "we could totally stop here and take the rest of the pictures tomorrow when it's might be cooler" was crazy high. That thought probably crept into my head after the 10th photo, when we still had over 40 left to do and it had already taken an hour. The pavement was getting hotter by the second, and immediately after I finished a pose I had to scramble to the shade to avoid burning my feet. But ultimately I knew that moving it to tomorrow would result in the exact same conditions, and then I'd be behind schedule. It was such an incredible feeling to finish that photoshoot and know that we had all the photos we needed for the book.
3. Be prepared to not be prepared
When at one of the two photoshoots for the book, we ended up having to stop and figure out how to remove the cleaner from the pool, because it kept getting into the shot.
In creating the e-book, I planned an entire week out to work on it, almost hour by hour. And then nothing went according to plan.
It was a nice thought to have things planned out, but ultimately you just need to know what needs to get done and be adaptable from there. We ended up having to completely rearrange the photoshoot schedule because of the weather, and then once we got there had to resolve tons of issues before the shoot could go on. We had to figure out how to remove the water skimmer from the pool without all of it's contents filling out, and then we had to find a way to take the photos quickly enough that my feet wouldn't get burned on the pavement (desert life lol). There were tons of other little things too, and if we had created a super strict schedule or tried to write out exactly the photos we wanted before we got there, nothing would have gotten done.
I learned a lot from this process, and I can't wait to share the e-book with all of you. Be on the lookout on my Instagram for more details soon!
