I've been treating my Sony RX10iii like a chubby little Hasselblad.
I've got it set to shoot squares and sometimes I go one step further and
set it to shoot black and white. And it's a camera I nearly always use
in the Jpeg format. So it's more like the old days of film when you
kind of had to more or less nail your shots in the camera.
Studio Dog is waiting for someone to come down the hall,
exclaim, "Oh my gosh, you are so cute!!!" at which
point she will manipulate them into giving her yet another
treat from the little jar on the small kitchen table
next to the (hardwired) telephone.
It's all retro here.
So, it's Tuesday. Yesterday was my day to get up way too early and drive the hour to Johnson City where we were supposed to shoot some board members for a utility company. I got there at 7 a.m., set up by 7:30 and had my first board member show up, in a rush, at 7:45. I got his photograph taken and waited for the next of the three new people to arrive. At the last minute the schedule changed and everyone went into a board meeting right at 8:15. "Another day." my contact said, "we'll come back and get the other ones on another day."
I tore down the lights and the soft boxes and the meticulously placed green screen and packed everything carefully back in their cases and bags. Then I headed back to Austin. I'll charge them enough to make the trip worth my time but it seemed empty to travel so much and shoot so little. I came back to the world headquarters of the Visual Science Lab and imported the files into Lightroom, did some rudimentary color correction and converted the selects into Jpegs then put them up on Smugmug.com, in a private little gallery for the client. I spent the rest of the day making airline reservations for next week's assignment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sorting out retouching and post production orders from clients and hanging out with my sometimes assistant and full time son, Ben.
Today is a "limbo" day. Not as in dancing under the limbo stick but as in stuck in limbo. I had a stack of things growing like weeds on the corner of my desk: Sign a contract to get a bunch of work done on my trees. Calculate and pay my state sales taxes. Bill several clients whose jobs I shot last week. Interrupt the billing process to read a book about how to cure procrastination. Get back to billing. Pay some bills online. Pay some bills offline. Have lunch at a little Mexican restaurant on First St. with my friend, Will. And then return to the studio to clean, clean and then clean again.
If you work as a photographer and you stay pretty busy you are always coming back from somewhere, on a job where you chose to use some assemblage of gear, and you are always getting ready to go somewhere else and, if you are like me, choosing other gear to take on the next job. There never seems to be time to unpack, stow the used gear and get organized so stuff starts to accumulate in little piles.
Then, all at once, you realize that tomorrow you'll be shooting in the studio with two clients in tow and you need to pretend that you are one of those highly organized photographers who keep their studios looking spare and Swiss. At this point I panic and start trying to do all my organization at once.
The schedule for the next 24 hours is a little tricky. I'm getting the studio totally set up and ready to shoot still life stuff first thing in the morning. Right now I'm taking a break (procrastinating) after having set up three soft boxes and five, big LED lights. The reason I want everything set is that I am scheduled to go to Zach Theatre tonight at 7:30 pm to photograph the dress rehearsal of Mary Poppins. Since the production goes "live" tomorrow I need to shoot this evening (usually until around 11pm) and then head home to post process the files right after. We need to get them to assorted sites and media tomorrow...
From 11pm till about 2 am I'll be importing, editing, color correcting and outputting. My hope is to start an upload to Smugmug.com as I walk out the door at the end of the night and then be up and going by 6:30 in the morning for the first of two shoots; the still life shoot for the healthcare devices client, followed by another location shoot at a different theater. We're shooting marketing images at a downtown theater and we'll need to set up lights, etc. but not the same lights we'll be using to shoot product...
I'm sure that by the end of the day I'll be toast. I hope to get some sleep on Weds. night so I can hit the post processing for these two jobs right after a dentist appointment (see, I'm having all the fun!).
I've got the shop vac out and my earplugs in. I'm trying to figure out a design-y way to store sandbags. I'm constantly back and forth on e-mail scheduling portraits with doctors who seem to have rampant scheduling issues. Little issues that seem to require a nearly constant fine tuning of appointments. It's largely insane.
But I am reticent to actually complain about any of this. It's what we wished for all the way through the downturn in 2007-2013 = a Summer of good paying, non-stop photographic work. Now, if I can just get through it all without collapsing from exhaustion. Some down time to nap on the couch with Studio Dog would be wonderful.
4 comments:
The photographic aspect aside, I find your commentary about running a solo business very interesting. I spent my entire career in the corporate world, holding both line and staff positions. In the early '80's I found myself between jobs and did some consulting (real work - not a plug in the CV).I enjoyed the consulting work and actually considered sticking with it, but for the fact that, as a solo act it was very difficult to both do the work and market myself, at the same time. Ended up going back to the corporate grind and when I did, I realized that I had become very dependent over the years, on all the resources at my disposal in the companies that I had worked for. I am in awe of your ability to juggle all of it - I'd probably opt for the couch more often then not.
If you can do all that before lunch, you're no procrastinator. For a true role model in that area of nonendeavor we have to turn to the late Phildelphia advertising wizard Les Waas. He is most famously known (or unknown by most) as the creator of the Mr. Softee jingle played over and over and over by ice cream trucks bearing that brand, driving kids wild and parents nuts for the past 50 years. In Philadelphia, though, Waas was best known as founder of the Procrastinators Club. It got its start when Waas bribed someone at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel to add to the long list of events, times and locations on the menu board in the lobby the line, "The Procrastinators Club has been cancelled". From there it grew into an annual...or almost annual...series of events, including a peace march in 1966 protesting the War of 1812. Waas did a fairly good job of postponing his own last parade, passing away in April at the age of 94.
more on the design-y way to store sandbags...
Going to Baton Rouge - that was my former home. Seattle now. Let me know if you need some restaurant recommendations. There's lots of good eating to be done in Red Stick.
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