Journal Entry # 18: Carlos Alone

Wednesday December 17

The following few weeks I will be working alone because the freelancer that was working with me has gone out of the country for personal reasons. This day I was told to keep it simple and do smalls. I began with new trophies that just arrived. Doing smalls is a quick and speedy process after setting up the camera and tripod. I was done in under an hour. I was then told by Dyann to finish the smalls from an isle that I started November 19th. Many of the items didn’t have an item number which made my day less productive. This meant I had to put the item aside and move on. Since many of them didn’t have numbers I had to put aside many. Dyann asked me during the middle of the day if I was okay. I was honest with her and told her that I was a bit down because I have to rely on Francisco’s lights to do other stuff. She agreed, and revealed that they are in the process of hiring a new intern for photography.

By the end of the day I was uploading images to their hard drive. I spoke with Sheri about the possibilities of getting a paid gig at Props for today. She shared with me that at the moment they can’t hire because the company doesn’t make that much money. That is why they heavily rely on interns to do most of the work. Currently they only have two hired freelancer. Michel a graphics freelancer and Francisco a photography freelancer. It was unfortunate to find this out. I wouldn’t mind the job so much if I was getting paid. At the moment I feel like I could be doing better things with my time to progress with my career goals relating to photography.

Journal Entry # 19: Carlos Alone pt 2.

Thursday December 18

Today was a typical editing day. Due to the holidays and different circumstances there is a pile of unedited photographs. When the Francisco began working at propnspoon things speed up a bit. Not to mention smalls, which are the easiest to photograph and are many of. Fortunately the images photographed with the strobes are easier to work with. The back ground is pure white which is easy to select and subtract. Unfortunately there is a lot to be done and no hands are currently available to help out. I wasn’t able to upload to the website the last hour of my time because there was a special task regarding an item. The thumbnail on the website and detailed shot wouldn’t show up. Michel, (graphics freelancer) left me a note saying that the image has been re-edited and needs to be resized. I did so and uploaded to the website. It did not work at first for some reason. I deleted the post on the website of the product and made a new one. It seemed to work fine after that.

Journal Entry # 20: Photographing Vignettes pt 2.

Thursday December 19

Today I learned an important lesson on tardiness. This was because I was two hours late. Sheri confronted me about the tardiness. I wasn’t so smart in what I said about why it might be that I’m late. I explained that its possible that a paid job vs an unpaid job might have something to do with it because I’ve never shown up that late to my paid job. Sheri then told me that even though this is unpaid it is important to be on time because right now I am building a reputation. She had a point and we agreed on it.

Soon after I was told by Dyann to photograph the Vignettes for their holiday event, which I will talk about in a separate post. I wasn’t so happy to hear this because I hate doing vignettes. During my early days meddling with Photoshop I quickly learned that busy backgrounds are a big NO NO. I also learned that less is more. They have a very small area in the front where its crammed with about 10 vignettes. One spills into the other or one has to many things. I was advised by Sheri not to worry and to do my best. I gave it the best I had. Since the lighting was poor I first tried long exposure, which I wasn’t pleased by. The images looked to soft. Then I tried a flash gun that I carry, and the results were so so, but nothing to be happy about. Finally I tried the HDR setting in my camera. What this does is it takes three exposures and puts them all together. I found this method the most effective because the colors were very saturated, the edges were sharper and there were no harsh shadows or highlights. The next difficult thing was fixing up the vignettes to get a nice composition. This required removing the tags off the items and putting them back. Also I had to re-arrange certain things to keep stay in proportion to the other items. For example: Move the love seat to the front to make it appear just as big as the couch. After that I had to put everything back and move on to the next one. I found that between 3-4 I had a really nice sun light coming through the windows, which worked in my favor.