All the elements were there: two energetic models in bright wigs and flashy clothes, hula-hoops, a cliché pile of decrepit factories in the background, the perfect evening light. There was one more element but I couldn’t capture it properly so I knew that it would have to be made later: how the sky was. The sky was steel-grey, angry-ocean blue. It loomed, heavy in clouds, ready to burst out in blue ink and tar.

I want you to see what I saw. In my fantasies I have a team of ridiculous proportions and a sharp, shouting voice that gives precise orders.  In it, the voice, I’m ordering the sky to stay still and apocalyptic, I’m ordering the team turn up the fans to blow the models’ skirts higher, to reflect the light onto their faces, I’m baroque, I’m Ann Leibovitz.

In reality I’m an amateur who has to be home by 8 PM to feed the baby and put him to sleep and then maybe once that’s done upload the photos and –  with a feature called lasso tool – meticulously separate the sky from the rest and up the levels and contrast the dark on the free photo editing program. In reality I go to sleep, angry at the lasso tool. But I know that the image I had in my head exists and I can make it come out or get to it as close as possible. 

It started with film. I took nice photos by the time I was 12 – a memorable one of my tiny serious sister’s face in flowers, me pointing the lens from below so that she towered over, suddenly a giant toddler with sad eyes, and the sun filtering through her wispy hair. When I got my digital SLR (single-lens reflex system which allows the picture seen to be captured as seen) camera, taking photographs became easier – I could take 100s while experimenting with shutter speeds, apertures, filters.

I’ve staged settings to shoot the images I had in my head: bizarre families, a Japanese demon figure in the snow.

I shoot all the time, even when in between the takes – each shoot has a mood and even if it doesn’t come out on film, it is possible to capture it and make it come out. In the article My father didn't "take" pictures, the author, Stephanie Tames, writes about how her father ended up with a famous photograph of JFK:  It wasn’t staged but the artist picked up on the moment's elusiveness and beauty right there and shot a couple of frames: “He said he had seen an image in his mind and knew that underexposing the film would create more than a picture of the president.”

 Making pictures is a little bit like writing. In photography, there’s the news reporting, there are features , short stories,  novels , poems and so on. Like writing, too, anybody can (technically) do it – how hard is it to point and click, really? And with current hipstamatic app on an iPhone it seems like everyone is suddenly  a photographic genius. (And I hope that iPhone will soon come up with an iPoem app to make texting seem more interesting.) (Not.) 

But as it is with writing, making a picture work is not always possible even if all of the elements are there. You can try hard but if the essence is missing, the photo will never convey what you want it to.

A while ago I was hired to take an author photo of a woman who wrote a funny, chicklit book. It was winter, wind so omnipresent it froze your thoughts into a fuckit’sfuckincold sort of mantra. The author showed up with rivulets of white foundation under her blood-shoot eyes, and carrying a pile of brand-new clothes. Her mouth was permanently turned downwards and I realized that the rivulets of makeup weren’t from the cold. She kept saying, “Make me look fun,” “make me look fun,” determined to breathe life into this carefree, hot-pink-clad version she had of herself. I told her to relax, ignore me. She said “But I can’t ignore you, this is a photo shoot, I have to make sure it looks good. Just make me look fun.”

I tried, but in the end I couldn’t make her anything.  I couldn’t see fun. The fun wasn’t there. I changed angles, locations, we changed outfits, smiles, we removed some of the makeup, let her hair up and down. We even did a couple of outtakes where I said I was going to check something and then lifted a camera to shoot as she was laughing away with her assistant. She would snap her head toward me immediately and beam at me with the biggest fake grin I’ve ever seen.  I shot more than 150 frames and even though during the shoot I kept reassuring myself there was always post production, in most photos she looked like a sad, disappointed lady clown. That’s what shone through every smile and unless we were trying for the Goth Olympics there was no way this was going anywhere intended.  

 I never charged her for the session and months later she wrote me saying she’d never worn makeup before, she worried about having to return the clothes to the store (she borrow-bought them) and that she hated having to fit this "fun"  idea. There were no hard feelings. I knew during the shoot there was just no way I was going to make it.  It was not there, I didn’t see it then. I couldn’t tame a fake smile but I can work with the sky – I saw it the way it was, I can make it look like what it was.