Slow it down and think

One of the things that I've had to work on is to remember to slow down during shoots.  Partially this is experience with equipment and partially it's nerves.  When I'm shooting I have a million things going through my head.  I'm thinking about everything from basic photography stuff, (exposure, depth of field, ISO, are the lights firing?) to simple composition (not even rule-of-thirds, more as in, have I cut off anything important?) to posing (generally the model, not me, my poses are fairly intuitive). At the same time that I'm thinking about all of this technical mumbo-jumbo I'm also worried about how the model is doing, and what she's thinking (this is taking too long, why is he futzing with the lights again?)

I find that sometimes I'm so wrapped up in this basic stuff, that I miss things that either then take forever to fix in post processing, or completely waste the shot, or even the entire set. 

The solution is to S-L-O-W   D-O-W-N.  It sounds so simple, but in real life it's one of the hardest things to do.  At least for me it is.  There are so many things that take about 2 seconds to fix in real life, or about 2 hours to fix in post.  Think about the shot.  Once the light is dialed in and you have the composition you want and the model is facing the right way and not making a claw grip and her skirt isn't tucked into her stockings, then just take a beat or two and look at everything again to make sure there isn't some tiny simple thing that is going to wreck your brilliant shot. 

Think about the entire shot, don't just fire away and hope to get lucky.