A lot of people like to use reference material for guidance and sometimes it can be appropriate to “pay homage” to a certain image or style, but I find it to be a little like cheating to rely to heavily on other images. I prefer the painful approach of trying to squeeze a few drops of an idea out of the moist sponginess of my own brain. I am going to assume that everybody does this but I go into every shoot with a strong notion of what I am planning on doing and then as the circumstances dictate, I improvise. And, as you can imagine, every possible scenario plays out over time.