Burnt Toast

Supposedly one of the signs of a stroke can be the smell of burnt toast.  Seems to happen about once a week in the building where our studio is located.  This building also has a harp manufacturer, you can occasionally hear them being tested and tuned.  It was a little disconcerting when these two events coincided.  Harp music isn’t my favorite, so I guess purgatory is the best I can hope for.

Working

Working images are hard.  Good locations are hard to get access to, good models are hard to find, making it authentic is hard, creating something that a buyer would want is hard.  I feel like we can sometimes succeed on the first three, but that fourth one is a complete wildcard.

 

So far this is a complete fail on the number four requirement.  Oh, well, I still like it, think it’s sale-able, and would shoot it again.

Life

They just make me smile.  Father and daughter shoot.

Hope and Planning v.2

We do a lot of coordination and planning and I should really do quite a bit more.  In general there are about three days of pre-production for every day of shooting.  The bigger the shoot, the more production days.  A few times a year we’ll take on a shoot that will take weeks to produce.  All of the elements need to come together, but usually we try to build in some measure of safety so that if one element fails, the entire shoot doesn’t collapse.  Sometimes you can’t do that, and you just have to hope for the best. Sometimes you just get lucky and it all works out.

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Random Thought

So I have a doc in my blog post folder that’s titled “Momentum”.  That’s it, Momentum and nothing in it.  Maybe that wasn’t the appropriate time to write that one down.

 

The good ones

The best thing about my job is that I get to occasionally hang with some really good people.  They remind you about life, and humanity and how we should all act, all the time.  Monday was a hard day around here, especially for this community.  These are the people that will make it OK.

 

I didn’t really do them justice, but thank you.

 

Hope and Planning

Sometimes you find a great location, know it will be perfect for a number of ideas and craft the shoot around those ideas.  Sometimes, you can throw all those ideas out the window as the day begins.  Sometimes, it works better than what we had initially hoped for.  This was supposed to be a sunny, summer-y day.

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For Fun

I don’t do a ton of editorial work and the rates that they pay don’t always make economic sense to even take the job.  But when it sounds interesting, it’s hard to say no.  You can get into some cool spaces and meet some very interesting people.  Sometimes there’s very little time or it’s a struggle to get something worthwhile, but it’s kind of like a creative pop quiz with a fair amount of freedom in how you answer the questions.

I was asked to do a portrait recently and I was able to access the location 45 minutes before the subject showed up.  It was one of the cool spaces.  After spending some time on our set up and figuring out a few different angles to shoot, I got to do something that is unfortunately infrequent, play.  Nothing brilliant, just a great space that made my life easier.

Fashion Show

12 Models

50 Extras

14 Crew

17 Power Packs

24 Heads

28 Hotlights

1,219 Still Frames

548 GB of Motion

9 Hours of Shooting

3 Weeks of Pre-production

1 Week of Post

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Shadow People

Play and repeat.  Plus the people in this totally kick ass.