Within the last few weeks I was lucky enough to land a few assisting jobs with well established working photographers. The first of which was a couple weeks ago on a Friday in the end of June and it was only for about an hour and 45 minutes. But I got to learn plenty in that small amount of time. It was with Kevin Casey of Kevin P. Casey Photography and took place in Bellevue at Intellectual Ventures taking a headshot of Nathan Myhrvold! And yes I did get to meet him too. =) If you’re not from Seattle you should know that he’s the CEO of the company, a huge collector of old inventions like fire hose nozzles and typewriters and one of the main authors of a new book series called Modernist Cuisine. Overall it was brief but a great learning experience.
Here’s a photo of the book series Nathan was a part of. Courtesy of modernistcuisine.com
Being able to set up and tear down different kinds of lighting equipment is a key thing for me to know so that I can help out with virtually any kind of lighting that a fellow photographer might have. Kevin also helped me realize that I was definitely underpricing myself. A common problem for a lot of people like me starting out, trying to get their foot in the door in this very competitive industry. When it gets competitive it’s easy for a lot of people to lower their prices just so they get the job. Which I BTW was not doing, I really just didn’t know how to price myself =P.
After that I got a 3 day gig assisting with Bradley Hart of Hart Photographic for a hotel shoot for Homewood Suites of Hilton in downtown Seattle. The gig mainly consisted of assisting for shooting interiors of various hotel rooms and features, the dining room, and a food shot depicting the reception dinner they do every night. To say the least it was pretty hard work and took a lot of time and dedication to really get the shots needed and do it right. I never realized how much set up and precision and care it took to really get a great looking interior shot, attention to detail is a MUST for this field! It could take up to a couple hours to get every single object and piece in the shot to the most perfect state and in pristine condition. There was lots of time spent adjusting the tiniest of things like moving a bedside table an inch or two closer or further, making sure the curtains were evenly spread, bedskirts were even to the floor and unwrinkled, pillows all properly fluffed and sitting straight and on and on.
It was really cool seeing him work with a Cambo on his 5D Mark II. It’s a great way to utilize that 4×5 camera style but still using digital. It almost makes me nostalgic thinking about the good ol’ days when I had to lug around a large format camera in downtown Seattle for school…ALMOST. I had to carry one of those from my school, the Art Institute, all the way to my bus stop at Benaroyal hall and if you don’t know what that means, it means I walked FAR with a very very heavy camera and tripod. I swear I almost died when I got to the bus.
If you don’t know what a Cambo looks like, here’s a photo courtesy of Cambo.com
Lastly, I had another small half day gig the other day assisting for Richard Brown of Richard Brown Photography with a few corporate head shots of the big execs that needed to be taken in Redmond at VMC. VMC does video game testing for various companies including Microsoft. The gig was fairly basic. I helped carry over equipment, set up lights and was able to relax a bit while Richard took the photo’s. It was all over within an hour or so and was fairly painless.
All in all I have to say that the last few weeks were very informative and a great opportunity to really look into the photo industry and see what the proper business practices are, how to better handle clients and subjects and what it takes to get the shots needed. I am definitely going to pursue this further and start assisting a whole lot more. It really is a great job to have!
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