Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Anything (almost) for a buck!

When a client calls, the answer is yes. With very few exceptions, that describes my life as a professional photographer. This blog probably shows that I am a primarily studio photographer. My food photography blog shows my studio speciality. But when a food client calls and asks me to shoot an event, I answer yes... and then run around to figure out how to do it. This client hired me to shoot three days of a big corporate meeting last year. I had to learn then how to use an on-camera flash (not even TTL). I ran around and shot tests until I was secure in my new ability. It's funny that with over 30 years in this business, I have never had to shoot one of these things. Well, the 3 days went great. I shot the meetings, gave them jpgs each day for a slide show and even set up a portrait shoot in a hotel room. Since then I have gone back to shooting products and food for this client. Then 2 weeks ago they called again, this time for a sales meeting. My answer was: yes! Especially for my day rate.
I set up my MacBook Pro on a table in the corner and launched Lightroom. Then I switched between 2 cards as I shot, downloading one card to Lightroom while shooting to the other. I was able to equalize all of the images quickly and even ran a slide show of the downloaded images on the laptop as I went back and shot. It was actually fun, made my client happy and made the studio money. What could be better than that?

No comments: