Trick-or-treating was more fun this year because we'd lived in the neighborhood for more than a week. We didn't have to worry if we were going to get lost.
Halloween in general was also more fun because I could torture the cat--dressing him as a pumpkin for Scrappy's school parade. He was a good sport.
I thought I would have been starting on illustrations for a paid assignment on Monday, but instead I shot Monday, cleaned most of Tuesday, and have been avoiding the illustrations all morning. I received the details last night, so it's not like I've been avoiding them all week, but... here I am blogging instead. Maybe the inspiration will come after this episode of My Super Sweet 16 ends...
I was thinking about watching that episode of Chuck I had on DVR when I realized that I should probably continue to get my money's worth out of the rentals. I had wanted to see what the difference was between the reflectors and the diffusers included with the umbrellas, but decided instead to use my softbox and ring light. Why catalog lighting I don't own? The white board (and positioning of the slippers) is my catalog for future reference...
While I was celebrating the newly instituted Tiara Tuesdays, my landlord was getting the garage cleared out. All that good stuff that I had models posing with is now gone. How boring.
Thanks, SI, for proving once again what a jinx your cover choice can be... The party was quickly over after that cover. I found these today while cleaning. It was nice (?) to see that no one from these covers is in the World Series.
The shoot ended rather early (I consider anything before 6 p.m. to be early), so there was plenty of time to let the cats out and watch them entertain themselves. Streaky found a big fat fly to eat. I have no idea where the fly came from. Or, for that matter, the bumble bee the cats were chasing before the fly.
Shoots never come together quickly. This was an exception. A makeup artist and a model contacted me about shooting. I said I would shoot avant-garde beauty with them. They were both excited. I really know nothing about avant-garde, but I wanted something different and I wanted to use my rentals at least one more time.
I totally expected one to say she couldn't shoot--not on such short notice. Both were available Monday, both had no problem with the location, both were responsive to emails. This was bizarre. Shoots don't come together in fewer than three days.
Thirty minutes before the shoot, I get a call from the model. She's hoping I can excuse her tardiness--she spent the night in the hospital after a life-threatening asthma attack. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to shoot. She couldn't wait.
It was a good shoot.
LV really wanted me to shoot his GI Joes. They've been waiting in a bag all summer. But his idea was to show the new Joe with the old Joe. Unfortunately, most of the rubber rings in the old Joes need to be replaced and no one in our neighborhood sells those rings. So we shot other toys instead, like the new Indiana Jones and Violet from the Incredibles.
I wanted to try something new with the lighting, so, even though I was using the rental umbrellas, I dragged out the giant light table.
I was supposed to meet up with a client at 3 p.m., but he had another shoot to attend. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the shoot. I was curious, but I still had too much retouching left. I said I would meet up with him after the shoot. At 10 p.m., LV and I were sitting at the Starbucks in Union Square wondering what the cut off point should be. I rescheduled (and tried to think of it as a cute little coffee date for me and LV).
I tend to light everything high and directly in front. But on this day, I quickly learned to shoot with back light. It made things completely different from any shoot I've done before.
The sunlight in the picture on the left is was started all the back lighting. Then I wanted to exaggerate what was happening in the doorway. Then I needed to recreate that in the laundry room (before we got kicked out). I don't think I'll ever go back...
Last minute shoots always require some dramatic planning. Planning for Wednesday seemed excessively dramatic. Everyone had something else they should be doing instead. (Example: I shouldn't be doing new shoots. I should be retouching in order to start printing so I can circulate my portfolio to find paying jobs.) But I found a team and found ways to meet all of their needs. The shoot was on.
I saw an ad on craigslist for a web designer/photographer. Trying to swap web designing for group shots didn't prove to work out previously, so this time I offered to photograph what they needed in exchange for what I needed. Not until the morning before the shoot did the idea really strike me for how to anchor the shoot. I wanted something more emotive than what I had, but "anxiety" and "happy" were just too vague. I wanted something specific. I decided to pull the more interesting announcements from my Facebook account. The picture above is "[Name] cannot wake up. :("
This is a picture LV, my lovely assistant, took of me taking a picture of "[Name] wants to bury her head in the sand and not wake up until 2009." LV's not into the absurd, so it really wasn't his cup of tea. I am his cup of tea, though, so he bared down, made nice with all the pigeons on the roof, and was a great assistant.
This wasn't really part of the series. More just to make use of the sunset and a group shot.
On yesterday's shoot, the model said her mother would say the makeup artist didn't show up because that's what she gets for shooting on a holiday. The makeup artist emailed to say her makeup bag had been stolen, which made me wonder if she too was pissing off God because she was working on Yom Kippur.
When the modeling coach (yeah) asked which holiday it was, I said that all of October is a Jewish holiday. I had just seen the B&H and Adorama schedules, and both were closed for most of October. I say, "I'm screwed if anything happens to my equipment this month." Later that day, my flash stopped working...
However, I had been thinking to myself how nice it would be to be contacted about shooting agency models. Why doesn't someone ask me to test their models, I wondered. That afternoon I received an email from an agency asking me to test two of their models. Yay!
The good thing about Adorama being closed all month is that they were giving away their rentals. I could rent lights for 13 days for the price of a 4-day rental. But there goes all the money from my Boston shoot: rental, repairs, transportation for heavy equipment...
To try to save some money (because after picking up rental lights at noon, I rented *more* equipment from Flash Clinic where I had just dropped off my broken kit), I carried 60 pounds of sandbags about 15 blocks. All that sand can fit into a tiny box, so the sight of me struggling with a small box invoked comments from a lot of people who thought I just needed some encouragement. Encouragement, no. More muscle, yes.
A model I previously shot referred another model to me. It was really great to have a paid shoot, but that didn't really put any cash in my pocket. On the last look, the flash stopped triggering. Model lights, good. Flash, no go.
Meanwhile, though, I did learn how to change the flash tube when I finally plugged in the third light I never use.
I took a break from retouching (that's all I've done all day all week) to clean all day instead. It was different.
LV hates clothes for pets, but, when I said I wanted to get a little puffy jack-'o-lantern costume for Streaky, he was game. Streaky on the other hand... At least he didn't try to take it off right away.
The post work is the mos annoying part of this job for me. I've been retouching all week. Tuesday I overnighted three disks from the shoot in Boston. Thursday it turns out you can't drag 200 raw files from the DVD to the desktop without it breaking, so I had to resend the files. Twenty-five hours later, I'm done ftp'ing all the 366. To avoid repeating the situation, I copied 20 at a time every hour. Yeah, every hour. I set an alarm in order to wake up every hour so there wasn't a break in copying files overnight. Now I have to get back to retouching. I *really* want to update my portfolio with all the work I've shot in the past six weeks.
