What I don't have is interest. There's a lot going on in my life, and I'd rather get on with it than write about it. Besides I doubt anybody really wants to read about it. So I've been neither writing in my blog, nor really reading the blogs of others. I check in on Aces Full and Pandora's Tea Room every now and again, but that is pretty much it. I post on MOTL every now and again, but not too frequently now that the werewolf games were cancelled due to people taking them too seriously.
What's been occupying my time is my photography business. It seems to be picking up, which is great, because I simply love this work. I did a school dance in February, and a photoshoot for an aspiring actor. In May I did a costume shoot for a dance school which is the first shoot I've done where I can unequivocably say that I made pretty good money.
June's been hopping. I did a graduation shoot for a relative (no money, but I did some networking at the school while I was there that might turn into business), and a graduation party for the same relative. This past Thursday night I shot the dress rehearsal for a stage production of a dance interpretation of Peter Pan. Friday night I shot the eighth grade dance of a middle school in southeastern Massachusetts. Then Saturday I shot the 1PM and 7PM performances of Peter Pan (42 Gb of pix in one day… yowza!)
I wrote about this a little bit on a message forum, so I figured I'd share that here.
June 12, 2009 11:01 AM
Last night's shoot went well but I am exhausted. I took a chance and produced a 36″ x 24″ (poster size) print of the main cast (with some added text) and it came out GREAT. I was amazed. I expected at that size the image would be very fuzzy–you know “stand a few feet away and it will look fine”. Nope, it was nice and sharp. About 90 minutes of post production and cost about $50 to print, and I gave it to the dance school director as a gift.
She went positively gaga over it and hung it immediately as a poster for her show. The kids loved it too.
Of course I had a couple totally unrealistic parents come up to me after the show asking if I “had any extras” or would “give them one”. “These are quite expensive to print. Of course I can have one made and shipped to you but it would cost $100.” “Oh forget it then.” LOL. It's so hard to make money in this business unless you are doing weddings or products. For the costume shoot I spent 8 hours shooting, and 50 hours in post production. My total profit after printing and shipping was $800–that's $13.75 per hour and no matter what price you charge people think it's too much.
Anyway the dress rehearsal shoot went great, apart from the 580 EX burning though batteries like there's no tomorrow. 4.5 hours of shooting, 1,105 pictures, 30 batteries eaten. I picked up a digital frame and loaded it with a bunch of work I've done over the last couple years and set that up next to the fliers–that got some attention. I had a number of people come up to me after the show and tell me how much they loved my work, which is always nice. We'll see if they still love me when I raise my prices next year. 
So tonight I have a middle school dance to shoot, and then tomorrow I have to shoot the performances that I went to the dress rehearsal for. Busy few days!
June 13, 2009 1:55 AM
Tonight's Middle School Dance shoot was exhausting but fun. These kids were different that the kids at my daughter's middle school–they were a lot stiffer… nobody danced for like the first 90 minutes. I was like WTF? Heck I wanted to put the camera down and dance myself. The DJ was great, all the tunes were current.
This was an 8th grade dance and soon the kids will all be going off to different highschools so there was a lot of emotionality… a lot of kids were crying toward the end… that doesn't exactly make for a nice photo.
Kids at my daughter's art school are also more hammy for the camera, these kids pretty much constantly ducked and hid whenever the camera showed up. This behavior drives me nuts, I'm being paid to shoot the dance, these kids are bawling that they're not going to see their friends again, and they're not going to have pictures of their friends to remember because they're too busy responding to the camera in the way they've been trained to respond “ooh don't take my picture I look ugly”. You just want to say “Jesus, grow up already.” Sometimes I say to them “this may come as a surprise, but we can all see you… we already know what you look like.” No matter, I just switched to the 200mm and shot long… you get nice closeups that way and the kids don't know who is being photographed.
All in all I think it went well. Two big shoots tomorrow… man am I beat.
June 13, 2009 9:44 AM
Fell out of bed about 8:20… showered, shaved, and will be heading out for the third and biggest of this weeks three shoots. What an exhausting time this has been! No flash today ('cept before and after) so I shouldn't need a frickin' gross of AA batts…
June 14, 2009 7:37 PM
Yesterday's shoots were positively EXHAUSTING! But I think it went well. At the end of the afternoon performance I knew I was in trouble tho… I had shot 20+ Gb of pictures, and I only had 22 Gb in CF cards with me. I had time before the 7PM performance so I went to best buy and purchased another 20 Gb of CF memory (1x 8 GB, 3x 4 Gb). During the second performance I shot the entire remaining 22 Gb. For the after photos I had to switch from RAW to JPG, and pull out my old “emergency card”–a 512 mB card that I've often questioned why I still carry it. Thank heavens I had it!
But 42 jigglebytes in a single day is some outrageous shooting. About 3,500 pictures. Sorting through this is going to be fun. Lightroom is chewing on them now and probably will be until tomorrow.
Emma was able to perform as Peter Pan, which was nice, though she had to hold back and give a slightly more subdued performance to prevent further injury to her ankle. It was nice seeing her dance at all though.
The “movie poster” was a big hit. About 700 people filed past it and every time I went out into the hall to shoot candids there were people looking at it and my digital frame (yay!). The thing I liked best was when I caught the dancers looking at it, they really liked it and it made for some nice photos. Have I mentioned how much I love this work?
I got more compliments and requests on Saturday, some people looking to buy the poster print. I added it to the show gallery and enabled large format printing options (and T-shirts, which my lab has begun to offer).
So now begins the long slog of post processing. But with so many pictures to choose from I should be able to come up with some that are sure to please. And the post work should be hella easier than the costume shoot was.
Gonna be a lot of busy nights tho… but not today, today I am recuperating… 12 hours of driving over the last 3 days, getting home every night after 1 AM, sore as heck from shooting…
(Good news, I had two orders today from earlier galleries. Yay! Only $70 but I'm taking it as a good sign.)
Wow am I beat. 
But it's a good kind of beat, when you feel like you accomplished something.
On a quick run through the performance photos I found a nice little series. Peter Pan was not on a wire, so she got about by making beautiful acrobatic leaps. I managed to snap a series of leaps (on the tail end of the leap as she was coming down) as she leapt around the dancer playing the part of Wendy Darling. In the series it looks like Peter is flying… 
Sweet!
I am glad you're keeping busy and enjoying it!