On April 6th there was a Meet the Pros event and for my Design Team class, attending it was part of my class meeting. The guest speaker was a photographer who’s name is Christine Blackburne. She started off her speech by showing all of those that were attending the event photos of her work and highlighting stories behind each photo. Through the use of humor in these stories she grabbed a lot of our attention, although there were a select few in the audience that were just preoccupied with their own classwork to pay full attention to her. The time came where we were able to ask our own questions, although I didn’t ask any, there were a few interesting questions that were being aimed towards her and her answers were pretty honest. One of the questions that stuck out to me was when someone asked her when did she know it was time for her to stop being an apprentice/intern and to start making her own career moves. She went over her struggles in the beginning about how being a woman, kind of made her hire processing a bit lacking. She told us that at one point she was considering to changing her name on her website and business cards to “Chris Blackburne” instead of “Christine Blackburne” so that people might be a bit more willing to hire a man than a woman for certain jobs. A lot of her work was shooting still life photography and book covers, she’d spend over a day or more getting the perfect shot through many means of timing and props. I was quite surprised to learn that photoshop was only used for minor touch ups and no real heavy editing, the reason it surprised me was because a few of her photos just seemed extremely surreal or at least extremely difficult to capture something that cleanly.