Risk assessment

Creating a magazine will obviously come with many, many challenges. In this post, I will talk about some of my biggest concerns and some solutions if they really do happen, although I hope they won’t.

1. Weather – snow melting too fast: This is currently my biggest concern as I am doing an outdoor photoshoot for what I consider the most important part of a magazine, the front cover (and the back cover and others).

Potential solutions: I will either make the garment extremely fast so that the photoshoot can take place before the snow melts or I can try to go slow and wait for the next snow and do the photoshoot then. Personally, I want to try to hurry so that I can do this photoshoot before the snow melts because I have everything else planned (design, location, etc).

2. Editing problems: The overall vibe of my magazine will heavily depend on editing because, as I’ve mentioned before, I want to go for a more warm-toned and bold coloured vibe, but there are external factors (weather) that makes it nearly impossible to achieve naturally, especially in an outdoor photoshoot. Therefore, editing will play a huge role and my main concern for this is that editing won’t be able to create the overall vibe I want to go for.

Potential solutions: In the case that editing won’t help me achieve the vibe I want, there is nothing I can do other than schedule an indoor photoshoot and use artificial lighting (and others), however, this might cause a lot of stress as it will be on short notice, so I thought of things I can change and that’s the colour of the garment. In my photoshoot planning post, I mentioned that I will spray paint to colour my garment into the colour I want.

3. Camera: The camera was also something I was a little worried about. I don’t own a professional camera and honestly, I don’t intend on buying one soon. I was thinking of either asking to borrow my teacher’s or to rent one, but, because my magazine’s theme is sustainability, I want to learn to work with what I’ve got so I decided to just use an iPhone, which I already own.

4. Not being personal: I am also worried that my audience might think that my magazine is not personal or that it lacks emotion because of my choice to not use models. However, I stand by that choice because I want to show my audience that making a change isn’t fitted into a few people.

Solution: A solution for this risk is to make sure my articles and content will be more relatable and personal.

Overall, I think I have a pretty solid plan for creating my magazine, but my main concerns are related to the photoshoots, as I have never done photoshoots before. Obviously, I hope for everything to go smoothly, but having concerns for trying something new is very normal. Laying out my worries and thinking of solutions helped me feel more in-control and calm.