700 Photos, Five Keepers & One Badman
Sometimes running a food brand means developing recipes, sourcing ingredients and making sauce. And sometimes it means spending an entire day trying to get one decent photograph of yourself standing next to a half-life-size cardboard bottle wearing sunglasses.
I thought this particular job would be easy.
More than 700 photographs later, I had five that survived the cut — and just one that I absolutely loved.
Welcome to a slightly less polished side of life behind Jerk Centre.
How Difficult Can One Photograph Be?
The idea sounded simple enough.
I wanted some new photographs of myself with Badman Sauce. Nothing too elaborate. Just me, a bottle of sauce, our Badman cardboard cutout and a camera.
In my head, this was going to be one of those jobs that took an hour or two.
Set everything up.
Take a few photographs.
Choose the best ones.
Done.
That was the plan, anyway.
There was no studio full of people behind the camera. No photographer telling me where to stand. No stylist fixing things between shots. No lighting assistant quietly moving things around while I concentrated on looking vaguely natural.
It was essentially me trying to be model, photographer, creative director, stylist, lighting department and Badman’s personal assistant all at once.
And once the camera started clicking, I quickly discovered just how many tiny things have to be right at exactly the same time.
Was I standing in the right place?
Was the bottle facing forward?
Could you actually see the label?
Was Badman completely in the frame?
Was the lighting behaving itself?
Was I smiling too much?
Not enough?
Did I look natural?
And perhaps most importantly…
What are you actually supposed to do with your face when you know a camera is taking hundreds of photographs of you?
Every time I thought I had everything sorted, I would notice something else.
Move slightly to the left.
Turn the bottle.
Fix my hair.
Straighten Badman.
Try another pose.
Check the camera.
Start again.
For something that sounded so straightforward, it very quickly became a full production.
Except the entire production team was me.
And Badman, naturally, contributed absolutely nothing.
He just stood there in his sunglasses looking cool while I did all the work.
Which, in hindsight, probably should have been my first warning about how the rest of the photoshoot was going to go.
Then Came the Other 699
What followed was a very long lesson in just how difficult it can be to take one photograph that actually feels right.
There were shots where my eyes were closed, shots where I was looking in completely the wrong direction, and plenty where the bottle seemed determined to sit at the most unflattering angle possible.
My hair had ideas of its own. The lighting kept changing. Badman somehow managed to get himself cut out of the frame more than once — which is quite impressive considering he is a half-life-size cardboard cutout and was not actually moving.
Then there were the photographs that looked perfectly fine on the camera screen, only to become completely unusable the moment I viewed them properly.
Take another.
Adjust the bottle.
Fix the hair.
Move slightly.
Try again.
And again.
And again.
Somewhere around photograph 400, I began questioning every decision that had led me to believe doing my own photoshoot was a good idea.
By 600, Badman still looked exactly the same.
I did not.
But somewhere amongst all those blinking eyes, strange angles, lighting changes and questionable poses, a handful of photographs were beginning to stand out.
I just had to survive the rest of the photoshoot first.
And Then There Were Five
Eventually, after taking more than 700 photographs and going through what felt like every possible expression, angle and pose, I managed to narrow them down.
Not to fifty.
Not even to twenty.
Five.
Five photographs that I genuinely felt were good enough to keep.
At first, that number sounded slightly ridiculous. More than 700 photographs for five usable images hardly felt like a successful day’s work.
But the more I looked at them, the more I realised that perhaps that wasn’t really the point.
I didn’t need hundreds of photographs.
I needed a handful that actually felt like Jerk Centre.
Some were more polished. Some were more playful. Some were probably better posed than others.
But there was one photograph that I kept coming back to.
There was something about it that felt different.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
I just knew that, out of all five, that was the one I liked most.
Would Vincent Choose the Same One?
Once I had finally narrowed more than 700 photographs down to my final five, there was one person I wanted to show them to.
My husband, Vincent, who is also a director of Jerk Centre.
I already knew which photograph was my favourite, but I deliberately didn’t tell him.
I didn’t want to influence his decision.
So I showed him all five and waited.
He looked through them.
Then he stopped at one.
“That one.”
Of course, it was exactly the same photograph I had chosen.
When I asked him why, his answer was simple.
“It’s got character.”
And that was it.
That was exactly what I had been trying to put into words.
It wasn’t necessarily the most perfectly posed photograph.
It wasn’t the one where everything looked the most polished.
It was the one where my expression seemed to be telling an entire story by itself.
I’m holding the Badman Sauce bottle and looking across at Badman with a sideways expression that seems to say something — although even I’m not entirely sure what.
What has he said?
What has he done?
And why am I looking at him like that?
Perhaps that’s what makes the photograph work.
It leaves something for you to decide.
For a character who doesn’t even have a face, Badman somehow manages to look suspiciously responsible for the whole situation.
And judging by my expression, I’m not entirely convinced by whatever explanation he’s giving me.
Perhaps Perfect Is Overrated
The whole experience made me think about something.
When you’re building a brand, it is very easy to become obsessed with getting everything perfect.
The perfect photograph.
The perfect bottle.
The perfect label.
The perfect display.
The perfect website.
And of course, we care enormously about how Jerk Centre is presented. We put a great deal of thought, work and love into everything we do.
But sometimes the thing that connects with people isn’t the most technically perfect thing.
Sometimes it’s the thing with character.
People see the finished photographs, the bottles, the awards, the website and our displays at events.
What they don’t always see are all the attempts that came before them.
The photographs that didn’t work.
The ideas that had to be changed.
The things that looked much easier in our heads than they turned out to be in real life.
And perhaps we should show you a little more of that side of Jerk Centre.
Because Jerk Centre isn’t being built somewhere inside a huge marketing department.
It’s being built by us.
One idea at a time.
One bottle at a time.
And apparently, on this particular occasion, more than 700 photographs at a time.
So, was it worth it?
More than 700 photographs.
Five keepers.
And one photograph that both Vincent and I stopped at for exactly the same reason.
Yes.
I’d say it was worth it.
Although Badman will probably tell you he nailed it on the first take.
Typical Badman.
