Photo from last week in the studio.
The past week has been the most hectic since I left America. Waking up early and staying up late everyday to be able to fit everything in. Being busy like this is one of my favorite feelings because after it's all over you look back and see all the amazing stuff you did. Then, you get ready for the next hectic week. Really it's just the life of anybody who loves what they do and are motivated to do more and improve themselves.
When I was back in America, I would do a photoshoot either at 9 AM til noon or 9 PM til midnight because I worked in the salon from noon til 9 PM. Sometimes I would shoot both times and work. Then, on the weekends I would spend the days catching up on all my post production, website, and whatever else needed to be done. Working that much was definitely hard and required me to stay focused and motivated, but I saw a drastic improvement in my work. Throughout that year I refined my lighting techniques, communication with models, and post production.
Photo from the beginning of last year.
Trial and error has been the main instructor of my photography career. I was never taught how to use the light in a scholastic fashion. It was seeing what worked and didn't work with the light to achieve my desired result. With editing, most of my training was watching countless hours of youtube tutorials and figuring out when certain techniques would work with my current problem with a photo. There's nothing wrong with learning through trial and error, but I felt like the best way I could take my craft to the next level would be getting a proper education. It was a hard choice to decide whether to spend thousands of dollars and go to school or to keep on learning by myself. I read dozens of articles from both sides and they all have one thing in common. They all say that in the end it depends on the individual and their personal needs.
During the basics I did know most of what they were teaching, but it is all the fine details that I wanted to learn and did learn. It was the reasons why you would use a certain lighting and how to properly set up a photoshoot that I wanted to learn. Initially, I thought that was what I was going to learn the most, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I have learned things that I hadn't even thought about before like developing a proper image naming system, triple backing up my photos, printer profiles, color profiles, monitor calibration, and the list goes on and on.
Photo from last week, shooting outside more.
For those of you out there that are just starting out or are wanting to improve themselves. I highly suggest developing a naming system for your files and folders as soon as possible so you don't have to go back six months of work to rename everything. Develop something that makes sense to you and stick with it because if you change you have to redo the entire process all over again. I would also back-up your files with a 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two mediums, one copy offsite. For example, I have two back up hard drives and one cloud back up. So there are three copies, the two mediums are hard drive and cloud, and the offsite copy is in the cloud.
This isn't the most interesting subject, but it is vital when you are dealing with thousands upon thousands of files. However, focusing on file management wasn't doing much good for my photography. I soon came to realize that how often I shot had a direct correlation with the quality of my photographs. That is why I was so happy this past week being busy with shoots even if it was tiring. I hope this helped any of you who were deciding if school is right for them or if they wanted to be self taught. Have a great week and I'll see you next time!