Good PE’s CALL and ask what happened, may run my baseline shot because they know how it can happen, or we negotiate a reshoot if there’s time. Not-so-good PE’s EMAIL me to tell me I screwed up, tell me to reshoot, and don’t return my call to discuss the images themselves.

You mention that photo editors should be trained in management skills, and I agree- I like to be treated like a pro and not a hired hand.
I’d like to add that all PE’s should learn as much as they can about photography itself so that they can better describe to us what they need, and better understand why we sometimes just couldn’t get the shot they were hoping for.

“The Feiner Points of Leadership”
(Michael Feiner)
sections include working with {boss, peers, ones one manages, meetings, etc}

Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines
(Forbes senior editor David H. Freedman)
include principles like
Tell ‘em the Result, and Why, and get out of their hair!
(DON’T tell ‘em *how* — let ‘em work their own way)
Be Bold
Grow The Good (if you put ‘em up, you’ll grow success: if you put ‘em down, you’ll grow failure. which one do you want?)
etc.

I’m constantly weighing expectations of prospects with those images that are on my website. Can I promise that level of quality if production values drop below my comfort level? And – what IS my comfort level? How much DO I want to rely on my talent and luck? Failure is risky and very uncomfortable. It’s not an easy game but managing expectations is THE big deal.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=132470

The pressure is already there. One thing that I think could help is greater flexibility, and one area that can easily touch is time. The more rushed a shoot, the greater the chance for failure. The less time between shoot and publication, implying less planning, then the greater the chance for failure. Proper planning doesn’t increase expense, and could actually reign in expenses. The same time approach could be applied to a shoot, because when everything at a shoot is rushed, then the chance of something going wrong, or the added distractions of reduced time (real or created), could lead to more failures.

As a photographer, when I fail to perform, I always blame myself first. It’s easy to blame circumstances or other people involved, but I feel it’s our (the photographers) responsibility to make sure, we understand the task at hand. This doesn’t eliminate mistakes completely, since whomever explained the assignment could’ve misunderstood it as well, but still, I find it healthy to look at myself before pointing any fingers.

Rob’s article and this subsequent thread is a great illustration of what I try to articulate. As a former photo editor at a newsweekly (US News) I completely understand the points Rob makes about why shoots might fail to produce good, or even usable images, and that this is a fact of life and can actually have a silver lining. (However from my experience, unless you can show that it was either the editor’s fault, or something truly out of your control, like a lost FedEx shipment, you had a pretty short leash for a while afterward.)

But in commercial work, failure is not an option. Period. Not only is the money for the shoot too big (reaching beyond $100,000 or more in many cases), and not only has the agency put in possibly hundreds of hours working on the campaign and setting up the shoot, but the money for the media buy of the campaign behind it may be in the millions.

A single instance of a shoot that produces no usable images can result in an ad agency losing an account, an art buyer losing his or her job and a photographer with a tarnished reputation among art buyers and ad agencies.

This is an example, I think, of a failure of art which gets a passing grade because the powers that be conspire to make it succeed.

For me researching my subjects in whatever way that I can before I contact them is required. Even if I can see what the person looks like so that I can start to figure out what I am dealing with visually. I once had 3 business portraits in a month were the subjects were all former college basketball players and the shortest one was 6 foot 8. Boy, does THAT change how you photograph them when you are 5 foot 10.

Walking in totally cold is the worst thing possible yet when you are given an assignment with little more than a name, phone number and “he’s an executive at MegaCorp”, you have to do whatever you can to be prepared. I am given that skeleton of information more that I’d like and far more than I should but I’ve learned to deal with it. My wife says that my super-hero power is “turning a goose poop situation into salmon mousse”. I think that comes from having been a news photographer for years where you are given assignments with 20 minutes notice – you learn to improvise with no support network.

However I do think that a large part of an assignments “failure” rests on the shoulders of the photographer. If you need more time/access/scouting/models/budget whatever and don’t let your AD know, even so that they can adjust their expectations, before you make photos then the failure is largely because you went willingly into a bad situation. I’ve had to call my AD numerous times to say “this isn’t happening. We need to change some things” because things have gone awry that we didn’t foresee. As photographers we have to take personal, professional and artistic responsibility for our work and if it doesn’t meet or exceed our standards we need to let the client know before we produce sub-par work.

The various times that I’ve had shoots utterly and completely fail, the resulting emotion was one that I could only describe as “liberating”. It seems that the worst has happened, the thing you always hope will never happen, but we all rise to the occasion and live thru it- the p.e’s and myself . I’ve had shoots fail due to my efforts, due to external efforts, and did have fedex lose an entire shoot ( transparency film) and all we had left to use were the snip tests. An in every instance, I seem to have been hired again by the magazine/client. The disaster seems to bring out the best in everyone….or maybe I just got lucky.

Really, the last two sentences of Rob’s post are the keepers.

So much effort goes into making a perfect shoot… and so many people have to be tapped to deliver 100% to produce the shoot at 100%. Becoming adept at moving through all the moving parts, diverse personalities and varying levels of competence, has always been a quiet hallmark of truly successful shooters. Delivering the truly exceptional shot is a triumph, delivering a pretty good image is a necessity. And in some fields, or subsets of fields, triumph is what is expected everytime.

I love posts like this.

Fail, Fail Again. Fail Better. ( a Samuel Beckett quote)

Failure is a part of producing quality content which is, what we’ve learned, the most important challange for print these days.

I’ve had a few failed shoots, but I’ve never blamed anyone for them more than myself. If the shooter screwed up, I didn’t choose the right one. If the production failed, my pre-pro wasn’t buttoned up completely. If my Art Director failed, I didn’t go over the shoot beforehand with him enough and explain my expectations and get everything on the table. Having said that, I usually find that if it happens, it’s because we’re generally trying to do more than we might actually be capable of – but then again, that’s a good place to be.

Not everyone works like this, but it’s the way I was trained in my advertising career: if something goes wrong, the buck stops here. Kinda harsh sometimes, but it ultimately works for me.

And, I find that it really makes for some long, trusting relationships with photographers – nobody could argue with that!

I’ve never blamed my editors (other than bad contact info or directions). I’ve felt that if I didn’t deliver it was due to a few things on my head.

I didn’t ask enough questions
I never looked at the clients publication or web site
I brought a bad start of my day to the shoot
I allowed myself to be distracted
I considered the shoot just another assignment
What I had was “good enough”

Rosh

The problem I run into now is that it is hard to get more than a name an address of the portrait subject. I always ask for a draft of the story or more details, but too often the photo editor has none.

I end up walking into the assignment cold, which limits me to work with only what is at hand.It also makes the publication look bad because I have to get the story again from the subject instead of coming in like a pro that has done his homework.