It’s pretty rare to have both “arts” and “geek stuff” categorized for an entry. But I guess this is the beginning of things to come for me — back to the roots.
After not having touched photography in any serious capacity for 11 years, I recently started investing in the craft again. Brian agreed that I should diversify and do what I enjoy the most and try to make money with it. Instead of going back to film, I retired my faithful Nikon N8008s and picked up the most “film-like” DSLR I knew (Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is based on Nikon D200 body) and some new gears to go along with it.
I was pretty fluent and advanced with film and darkroom techniques having experimented heavily with black and white film and silver prints in college*. But the age of digital media ushered me into a whole new game in terms of photographic techniques with digital darkroom (or so to speak). Not surprisingly Photoshop rules in this area… So now I am scrambling to catch up having to learn more advanced techniques in post production processing. It will be a glorious day when the earnings from my photography breaks even with all the investments in equipment and time I have made.
Fortunately some parents that Grace hangs out with really like my shots of their kids and are thinking about paying me to photograph them for special events. My jaw dropped when one of the moms told Grace that an event held by her parents cost them nine G for a photographer. Then I went back to dig out the website of one of my wedding photographers whom agreed to be a backup photographer for almost nothing because she’d just started out doing wedding shoots — she now charges between $2,200 to $4,500 depending on the package; things must have been good for Connie.
I am excited but at the same time feeling a bit late to the digital photography game and doing it seriously. That scares me a little. It’s like asking me to go back to doing CG, special effects and all that crazy 3D stuff again — I know the basics and used to know quite a bit, but the industry has left me behind to rot while everything else has been advancing in leaps and bounds.
Nonetheless, let the good times roll. Hopefully my deteriorating back pain can take the abuse of toddler/children photography**. 😉
* I have Tom Fischer to thank for his Zone System class. There’s no better person to learn Zone System from as far as I am concerned since Tom was one of the top disciples of Ansel Adams having been Adams’ assistant/student for a number of years. And I also have Craig Stevens to thank for all the expensive flim/paper/chemical combo experiments — that was possibly the single most expensive class I’ve ever had in college other than color photography.
** Try squatting a hundred times within a few hours trying to take pictures at the same eye level as those toddlers while trying to chase them and capture the best shots…. Hanging out with kids is fun (the gentle ones are), but taking good shots of them is hard. I think my S5 Pro already feels a bit slow for them.