The brief said one hero shot: girl, cupcake, joy. Simple. What the brief did not say is that a vanilla cupcake under a Florida afternoon has the structural integrity of a sandcastle at high tide, and that joy is hard to fake when you have eaten the same bite twenty times.
Take one through ten: too polite. I was nibbling like someone at a work event. The photographer, Joe, kept saying eat it like you paid for it, and I kept hearing eat it like a commercial, which is apparently a face I make. We regrouped. We got serious about being unserious.
Somewhere in the twenties, lunch arrived: a pepperoni pizza that was meant for the crew. It sat there in its box looking incredible, and I looked at it the way you look at an old friend across an airport. Joe shot that instead for ten minutes. That frame of me inspecting a slice like a jeweller ended up in the campaign too, which tells you everything about planning.
Take forty is the one on my homepage: frosting dotted on my face, cupcake split in two, zero dignity remaining. The client cried laughing in the best way. The lesson, as always: the outtake is the shot. It is the whole reason my zine exists.