An example of some preliminary doodles.

These are facing pages from one of my sketch books. This book is a wonderful little hardbound, four and a half by six inches. A beautiful handmade book made for something better than these doodles, but I love carrying it around.

As you can see, the left page was the sketch for this one, and the right page was the idea for this one. About half of the time, I'll get an idea that translates almost directly from doodle to photo. In other words, there aren't a bunch of changes in angle and pose (although the photography and lighting is another thing altogether). The rest of the ideas come more slowly and with many revisions. I prefer the first way.

I'll usually have several ideas sketched out, then go back later and see what seems promising. As you can see ( I sometimes write the date I shoot an image, and usually also when I think of the idea), for some reason, I didn't do the orange shot until almost a month after the toilet roll shot- "Just One of Those Days". When I finally got around to making the orange hunter, he was one of my most popular images ever. I just never know what's going to work!

I wrote in black marker "another version further back in book" when I came up with this idea, several weeks later.