A few weeks ago I was asked by a friend if I would take some pictures of their amateur dramatics production of Annie. It would be during their final dress rehearsal. I said OK I can do that. Then two days before the shoot My friend asks if I could shoot some portraits of the cast as well. OK a bit more work and I need to set up some lights but that will be fine. Two pocket flash a 24" softbox, light stand and two gray bed sheets for a backdrop. No problem. Three hours later and four hundred photos later I'm not so sure.
Everything was shot in manual mode and in RAW. all the portraits were shot with the same settings. So most of the editing was 'copy from previous image'. The photos of the production required a little more work. Tweaking the shutter speed depending on the stage lighting and shooting at 3200 iso. Low light and low noise are important areas of camera development and the companies do an excellent job. So most of the work involved colour and exposure correction.
Once I was happy with my selection of photos I up loaded them to private online galleries, each one with it's own private link. My Hotmail account has online storage so I just use that but you could use your website and set up a private gallery there.
The payoff to all this is twofold. I got some really good portraits and a week after delivering them I was asked how much I would charge to be the official photographer at the dramatic societies Christmas dinner. All the people who received photos were suitably impressed that a few hours work could potentially turn into several paid jobs :)
It may not the style of photography that I market myself as doing but if it leads to paid work and it is fun then why not go for it ?
More t.k.
Personal photography blog of photographer & retoucher Simon W Randall
