Now that I’m at the end of my Professional Practice module I have started to reflect on how its helped helped me throughout the year.
I never would have thought this time last year that I would have visited and assisted a wedding photographer at the Dorchester in London and be attending events for Pup Up Cafe.
At the start of the year I was determined to get experience in the industry but never thought it was going to happen because I tried last year and it didn’t work out. To start me off in the right direction I wrote myself a 5 year plan to briefly map out where I’m hoping to be in 5 years time. It also helped me to work out what I needed to do in order to get there. Now at the end of my first year of my 5 year plan I feel I have completed what I said I would at the end of my first year and now need to focus on completing my final year of uni.
I have gained so much more confidence throughout the year from assisting Robert to photographing events. I didn’t realise how much preparation went into organising an event from both sides. I needed to think professionally about what kit I would need as well as communicate to the event organisers.
I have to speak to the visitors of the events to double check they’re happy with me to take photos of them and for their images to go up online. I never expected my ‘career’ in a way with Pup Up Cafe to take off like it did I am now working with them regularly on their events and am booked in for more events over the summer, I hope to watch the business grow.
Because of this it’s made me have more confidence in myself to email around and ask people if they need me to help photograph anything for them.
I’m glad from assisting Rob it’s made me realise that it’s the profession I don’t want to go into, without helping him I wouldn’t have been able to work out if that’s what I wanted to do. I am however throughly enjoying the events because although they have the same structure to each events no event is ever the same.
Throughout the year I have tried to get experience from local businesses but have been unsuccessful. I tried estate agents thinking they might need someone to come around and photograph houses on the market every now and then and I got in touch with Pro:Direct as well as I have seen they have full time jobs going quite frequently that they put up on job sites.
Through lectures I have learnt a lot about how to act morally right and sensitively when taking images. I never thought that my images could be classed as unethical or morally wrong before but since learning out it I have thought a lot more into my images and will continue thinking about the law with every picture that I take and every project I work on.
One of my weaknesses still is confidence because I don’t think I’ll ever be the most confident person but I’m hoping that in the years to come if my confidence carries on improving year on year I will be well on my way to being a confident individual.
I have mixed feelings about the mini project and International Symposium because it was enjoyable but frustrating altogether. I enjoyed taking my images with a meaning behind them and with the hope of finding out the different modes of transport in India but it soon became frustrating when we were doing all the work and the students in India weren’t doing anything to help us, this resulted in us having to present to a camera and sending the recordings over to the students in India. Because of this we didn’t get a discussion going and was asked to redo the symposium. I was very annoyed by this because nothing was said when the symposium finished but most of us contributed the following week and it went better but still not anywhere near as good as it could have gone, partly to do with me because I didn’t contribute as much as I could have the second time round but I’ve learnt that for if I do another symposium in the future.
The Print Auction was another event that was very interesting. We again had communication issues, this time it was with the third years because they weren’t communicating with us so we tried to organise it without them in a way and we would do the most work. I put myself forward to be in the design team because I had never down any designing before and it’s something I always wanted to do.
My first job was to create a logo for the Print Auction which for me was quite hard because I’ve never made a logo before, I decided to make it based on the ISO scale. Throughout the preparation of the organising of the event we didn’t have many individual roles we all helped each other with each task that we had. The tasks we had to complete were creating a logo, coming up with a colour scheme, creating a slideshow and a brochure for the event.
When it got to the day of the auction we needed to do last minute advertising by handing out flyers. My job throughout the auction was supposed to be showing people into the event but there was more than enough people doing that so I asked if I could change to helping to make sure the prints went out in order as I thought this would be a lot more helpful as I didn’t want everything to be unorganised.
After the auction we had a discussion as a class to discuss what went well and what could have gone better.
The main points we said were that we should have been more organised but it was hard to organise with the third years being very slow with replying but a positive was that people came and we sold the majority of the work.
Overall, I did think the auction went well but I think it would have been better if we had some more people come as I think sometimes they weren’t aware of the photographers and how much the prints normally sell for so it would have been nice for some more people with more photographic knowledge.
I haven’t visited as many exhibitions as I would have liked to this year but I hope for that to change next year. I did visit one exhibition in Paris which was really good and insightful into just how much one person can produce over a career that’s still ongoing and how to display the work to an audience in order to get them to pay to see the work.
To help myself get my name out a bit more I have my own Instagram dedicated to my photography that I’ve had since I was at college but I was never very good at keeping it up to date and never felt I had work good enough to go on my Instagram but this year I started it from scratch. I’m slowly getting there with getting my images out to a wider audience by using hashtags so i just hope that it keeps progressing. I try to post every 2-3 days with a set of 3 images all linking together being posted within the same week.
I now also have made better improvements to my website this year by changing it over to Wix instead of Wordpress. Last year my website and blog looked alright but didn’t look anywhere near how I wanted it to but this year I’ve made it look so much more professional. I have different sections to see my personal work and then you can also see my blog by clicking on another section.
I have enjoyed this year because of all the effort I have put in myself for my future. I haven’t enjoyed the Print Auction and the symposium as much as I thought and expected but it was a good experience for me to go through to learn from mistakes. During third year I want to further my experience out of uni whether that’s with Pup Up Cafe or someone else.
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