Allow Me to Briefly Defy the Laws of Physics

With the use of an old Delorean, a flux capacitor I just happened to have lying around, and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, let's go back in time for a little visit to the recent past...shall we?

Our saga begins with the hero racking his brain, thinking up ideas for a new portfolio. A new portfolio to be used for grad school admissions. Our hero's current portfolio at the place in history where we've just arrived consists of shots from photo school, nearly two years prior. He decides this simply will not do, and stuffs the idea of applying to grad school, after spending a great deal of money on transcripts and postage, and time and effort getting letters of recommendation and such. Vowing to create an all new portfolio, our hero scraps the old stuff, and goes back to the drawing board.  Having looked at university websites, poring over portfolios and exhibitions of the students he wishes to be among, the hero is extremely confused, because a lot of it is crappy snapshots, and none of it involves fashion photography. He tries to mesh these images with advice garnered from past professors, that universities want to see continuity, series of images, and not disparate imagery.  He sits at the pub and writes in his moleskine, sketches, tosses the moleskine in the back seat of the car and forgets about it. 

Fast-forward 5 months. Our hero has graduated with his BS in Secondary Art Education. The prospects of a job are grim, né zero. He begins contacting models, and makeup artists, determined to put together a new portfolio, up to current standards if nothing else. But as any artist is prone to, he loses faith in his ideas, "it's been done before...to death", "this'll never be coherent enough as a series", "god, i'm so fucking broke, why did i quit my job so early?", "why does bureaucracy exist?"...but I digress.  Our hero has big ideas, but no budget, and getting things set up even this far has been a headache. He knows what he wants to do, but not quite how to get there. He currently thinks he'll continue on with what he's been doing, working with different people, seeing what clicks, and getting things together mentally for the future.  Given the economy, he'd really like to get this shit together by November, but November is a mere 2 months away, and money won't exactly be plentiful by then no matter what. It's all he can do, really.

From this point, we'll venture forward from the beginning of this process, somewhere after "he begins contacting models...", but before "...he loses faith in his ideas."