A feets of full of fests

There are “hand models,” people who earn money by modeling their hands for use in advertising  and editorial media.  They need to keep care of their hands, Can you work on your house? even a slight accident?  Oh!, just put a band-aid on it…

And you are out a few days work which financially hurts you, or worse! have to break a schedule which also hurts the business.

More than once working on a photo shoot, usually shooting  product shots where  which at moments requires  a  little less concentration, the environment becomes a little monotonous and you are picking up a product, moving it,  set up the shot  and making the shot, picking the product up again, moving it back and starting all over again and your mind finds time to wander . . .

More than once I found myself thinking “What am I doing?! Here I am spending all day arranging  how a small area of light is projected on a product while many millions of other people are suffering from hungry, cold, you know what I mean. Am I lucky to have this kind of job?

I did some marcom materials over a few years for a client and the marketing director always had the product photographs until one time it was a data sheet where  a new product needed to be photographed,  the photographer was near me so I said I would pick them  up.

I like to get out and see what others in the business are doing as it gives me a better understanding and I may just do it out of curiosity.  So if its not inconvenient I do it!! When I went to the studio the photographer gave me a CD with the images on it and we got into a conversation . . .

He talked about taking  a “Photoshop for Photographers”  themed workshop where he learned how to use some techniques and tools in the software so he could charge customers more money. He told me he charged the client  $100 to knock  out the background  in the digital image and that he was advised in the workshop that he could charge a $100/hr minimum. When I returned to my studio and called up the image on my computer the work the photographer had done was not up to my quality and I redid it, it took under 10 minutes, and I did not charge the client more money.

Forward a little, in a later conversation the marketing director made reference to the quality of the photoshop work also mentioning  a family relationship between the president and the photographer.  Maybe I had poor judgement, maybe  I could not resist, maybe I wanted the marketing director to think about the value of the budget, maybe I was just curious as to what would happen . . . but I told the marketing director that the original PSD work had not been acceptable and that I had redone it in about 10 minutes.  Our meeting shortly ended, we were close to the end of it anyway, and I never heard from that company or that person again.